Logo: Independent Living Institute (To www.independentliving.org)

Training as Vehicle to Employment: Newsletter, October 2007

Dear Reader

Welcome to the 3rd common newsletter to the EU wide project ‘Training as Vehicle to Employment’ (TVE). This project is being rolled out in Ireland through Centre for Independent Living Dublin www.cilireland.com

This project is a two year EU wide project focusing on national government agencies’ traineeships. There are two basic aims:

  1. To promote training positions in the public sector and to open them to persons with disabilities.

  2. To list the training positions that disabled persons can apply

This project is being run in Ireland, Latvia, Germany, Finland, Greece, Spain, Sweden Poland and Bulgaria. You can find up-to-date information from the international website http://www.independentliving.org/training

TVE at disability conference in Athens

Nicoletta Zoannos, transnational coordinator of TVE, was invited by Athens prefecture to present TVE and its innovative method at a conference in Athens on the 22nd of October. The conference covered disability and employment through different perspectives. 

Interesting American website: www.DisabilityStatistics.org

One can often read about the employment gap between people with disabilities and those without. According to the 2005 Annual Disability Status Report, the employment gap stands at 40.3 percentage points in the United States. However, little information is available about people with disabilities who are not working.

For instance, in the U.S in 2005, 6.4 percent of the working-age population with disabilities (or 1.4 million individuals) reported that they were not working, but were actively looking for work. Among these people, 49.4 percent reported a physical disability, 62.1 percent had worked in the past 12 months, 71.8 percent had a high school education or more, 24.7 percent were ages 44-54, 7.4 percent reported receiving income from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program benefits in the past year, and 7.3 percent reported receiving income from the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program in the past year.

These and other exciting statistics may be found on www.DisabilityStatistics.org. At this website, you will be able to compare statistics for people with and without disabilities.

Launch of new CIL Website www.cilireland.com

The new CIL website was launched on Thursday 30th August 2007. The improved accessible website can be accessed through www.cilireland.com where regular updates on the TVE project are posted.

Code of Practice for the Employment of People with a Disability in the Irish Civil Service

Within Ireland, the Department of Finance has the responsibility for implementing the aims of the national disability strategy and ensuring that the 3% quota is met across the public sector. The Department has recently published a new Code of Practice for the Employment of People with a Disability in the Irish Civil Service to address the following:

This new code of practice aims to create a working environment in which differences are respected and in which people; employees, clients and customers are valued as individuals. This document is part of a number of proposals made recently by the Irish government, aimed at improving the environment of recruitment for people with disabilities. Two further proposals include:

We will be monitoring the implementation of this new code of practice and updating you regularly on any measures introduced to co-incident with the proposals outlined above.

Significant to the ongoing monitoring of this new code of practice is the commitment given to an annual review which has been proposed, on all strategies introduced with the strategy. In particularly it is significant that the new code of practice recommends the following:

“ the Head of each Department and Office, in consultation with the Department of Finance, should put in place measures to evaluate periodically the effectiveness of the measures in place on the employment and career progression of persons with disabilities in that Department or Office[1]”.

We welcome the introduction of this revised version of the code of practice as an extremely comprehensive document which is a valuable document for other countries to refer to when encouraging best practice in government departments on the recruitment and employment of people with disabilities into the public sector. 

For further information please contact Cathy McGrath in the CIL Dublin office.

Handbooks

The handbook, as prepared for administrators who work in the area of Human Resources at government departments, state agencies and state-owned companies has been submitted to the Irish contact in the Department of Finance for review. Following consultation with the Department CIL would like to circulate these handbooks to all relevant staff within the civil service who have remit around the recruitment of people with disabilities. To celebrate the publication of these handbooks CIL will be holding an informal launch – date and venue to be confirmed.

National Network

The next meeting of the national network, to review the progress of the Training as a Vehicle to Employment Project to date will be held, to coincide with the launch of the handbook. Anyone who would like to input into this meeting or attend on the day are welcome to contact Cathy McGrath c/o CIL Dublin office.

The next Training as Vehicle to Employment Newsletter will be distributed in November 2007.

Sincerely,
Cathy McGrath Project Coordinator,
Centre for Independent Living Dublin
North Brunswick St.,
Dublin 7,
Ireland.
Tel. 01 8730455 or 01 8730986 Fax: 01 8730998
Email:info@dublincil.org


[1] Code of Practice for the Employment of People with a Disability in the Irish Civil Service: 13.


TVE project logo

Project documents

Information in English

Information in Swedish

Information in German

Information in Spanish

Information in Greek

Information in Finnish

Information in Bulgarian

Information in Latvian

Information in Polish

Training as Vehicle to Employment, TVE, was a two year project that started in January 2006 and ended in December 2007.

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