The disability confident scheme.  

In November 2021, City, University of London was awarded Disability Confident Employer (Level 2), under the Disability Confident scheme. Now, City begins its journey towards Disability Confident Leader (Level 3) in the hopes of gaining valuable recognition from disabled staff, businesses, and the wider community. Becoming a Disability Confident Leader is not without its challenges; organizations must actively recruit and retain disabled people, provide a narrative of the activities taken to become a Disability Confident Leader and report on disability, mental health, and wellbeing. So, where to begin? Lucky for you, I will share some useful tips on how your organization can begin its very own journey in becoming a Disability Confident Leader.

Step 1. Research how your organization can progress towards Disability Confident Leader (Level 3) from Disability Confident Employer (Level 2).

Researching is an essential tool in understanding how your organization can transition from Disability Confident Employer to Disability Confident Leader. From my research,  The Guidance for Level 3: Disability Confident Leader  is a helpful resource which lists the processes involved in becoming a leader and actions needed to renew your Disability Confident Leader status.  It also provides links to resources such as the validation template and the voluntary reporting framework which are both essential resources to help you complete your self-assessment and report on disability, mental health and wellbeing.  

Step 2. Contact existing organizations that have attained the Disability Confident Leader (Level 3) for inspiration and support.  

A spreadsheet is available of all the employers that have signed up to the Disability Confident Scheme, alongside a list of those who are Disability Confident Leaders. With this data, we narrowed down Disability Confident Leaders within the Higher Education sector and a total of nine universities were found to have attained Level 3. I then contacted these universities and asked what steps they had taken in becoming Disability Confident Leaders. To my surprise, we were provided with plenty of advice and resources and a special thank you must go to Universities of Bath and Cumbria for their incredible support. 

It would therefore be beneficial for your organization to track down Disability Confident Leaders within your sector and start conversations with these institutions on how they have progressed towards Level 3.  

Some further questions you can ask are: 

• How has your institution recorded and reported on disability, mental health and wellbeing? 
• Who was your validator and how did you source them? 
• In what ways has your institution provided a narrative of the activities, taken or to take, in support of being a Disability Confident Leader? 
• Are there any other resources that have helped you achieve Disability Confident Leader? 

Step 3. Fill in the validation template using your Disability Confident Employer self-assessment.

The validation template will help your validator configure whether you are delivering against the core actions as a Disability Confident Employer.  However, the validation template provided by The Guidance for Level 3: Disability Confident Leader is not accessible. Therefore, we made critical changes to the template to ensure the document can be easily read and understood by a wider audience (you should consider doing this too).  

Completing the validation template will also help you recognize what your organization is doing in terms of being disability confident and finding areas which may be missing or where more can be done. In completing our self-assessment, we found that some evidence was lacking amongst certain criteria’s including, encouraging our suppliers to be Disability Confident and engaging with Jobcentre Plus, Work and Health Programme providers to access support. However, this highlighted and gave us a sense of direction in what we needed to do to make valuable change in becoming Disability Confident Leaders.  

Step 4. Create an action plan on the processes you will take in becoming a Disability Confident Leader.

Creating an action plan is a great way to hold your organization to account. Your proposed course of action may be influenced by what other leaders are doing and/or your very own disability inclusion gap analysis. Some of our key actions will involve engaging with our senior diversity ambassadors in reducing stigma around disability, working with procurement to encourage our third-party vendors to become disability confident and ensuring our Staff Disability Network holds us accountable and keeps us on track. 

Considering how your action plan will look like, it is totally up to you, but here is a snippet of our action plan for some inspiration:

 

Step 5. Gather data which may be lacking before reporting on disability, mental health, and wellbeing. 

Ensuring you have plenty of relevant data is important when reporting on disability, mental health and wellbeing. We are currently reporting the percentages of individuals who consider themselves to be disabled. However, there is a lack of data which measures the wellbeing of staff at City. What we therefore intend to do is implement wellbeing questions into our staff surveys to ensure we gather data to report on mental health and wellbeing. 

Some wellbeing questions you can ask on your staff surveys are: 

• Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? 
• Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile? 
• How satisfied are you with the balance between the time you spend on your paid work and the time you spend on other aspects of your life? 

More questions like this can be found at What Works Wellbeing: Workplace wellbeing question bank. 

End note 

Now that I have sourced some guidance and tips for your organization to begin its journey in becoming Disability Confident Level 3, I wish you all the best of luck! Please do not hesitate to contact us on edi@city.ac.uk where we will be more than happy to collaborate with your organization. 

A little bit about me 

I am Vany Sony a recent LLB Law with Honors graduate and I am currently interning at the Office for Institutional Equity and Inclusion (OIEI) here at City, University of London through the GradVantage Programme. I am currently assisting the OIEI team in helping City progress towards Disability Confident Leader (level 3). Previously, I have worked with City’s Students’ Union in which I reported on accessibility concerns throughout the university and provided best practice recommendations for the Students Union. It has been enthralling continuing to learn about City’s EDI initiatives and contributing positive change for disabled staff and students at City, and I hope to continue researching, applying and promoting Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in my future endeavors.

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