Improving the Employment Outcomes for Students with Intellectual Disability

Project leads: 
Dr Kirsty Young, Faculty Arts & Social Science
Dr Deborah Debono, Faculty of Health
Duration: 2022 - 2023

This project examines the practices of positive deviant school communities across Australia that, despite working with the same National Curriculum, State and Territory guidelines and restrictive budgets as other schools, have found innovative ways to support students with intellectual disability (ID) to engage in authentic work preparation activities, in the form of micro-businesses, that extend into their local communities.

This project will work with teachers demonstrating positive deviance to address the challenge of providing authentic work experience opportunities for their students with ID. We will use a co-design approach to develop an evaluation framework based on program logic data, to enable the adoption of effective and desirable practices by key stakeholders (teachers, young people with ID, families and employers) and the wider special education community.

Further, this project examines innovative programs developed by schools/teachers authentically embedded into school life. The school-based work preparation programs to be investigated as part of this project were developed by schools/teachers without additional funding or support. Given no special resources were allocated to develop these programs, their activities can be more readily transferred to other school contexts without the need for additional funding or resources.

There will be three practical outputs: (1) work preparation program guidelines, developed from program logic data extracted from the positive deviant schools; (2) evaluation framework based on output (1) data and co-designed with teachers, young people with ID and their families. Outputs (1) and (2) will be disseminated to secondary schools across Australia that educate young people with ID. Output (3) is a short online course for organisations taking on work experience students with ID, that will be housed by UTS Open.

What impact will we create? 

We know from our previous work in schools, that schools work in relative isolation. This means, without intervention (as proposed in this project), there is little to no knowledge transfer between schools. This project aims to address this identified problem by capturing positive examples of practice and transforming this learning into usable guidelines to inform other schools attempting to achieve similar goals (i.e. improved employment outcomes for their students with ID). Further, the project's design will develop a community of practice among special education schools across Australia that participate in the program logic and co-design evaluation phases.

The focus on co-designed evaluation will help to create an understanding of which school-based work preparation innovations work, for whom, from whose perspective, and how they are best implemented across various school contexts.  Further, evaluation can help select those innovations most appropriate to address existing limitations in school-based work preparation initiatives for young people with ID. With the co-design of the evaluation framework, the project objective is to produce a tool teachers can seamlessly embed into their daily practices without creating new obligations or demands.

For the young people with ID and their families, this project's success might relate to increased self-esteem of the young person - seeing themselves as employable, being able to demonstrate/articulate their work skills to others (beyond school), and engaging in conversations about employment. For families, seeing their child/sibling engaged in authentic work practices during school years may change their perceptions about the future prospects for their child. This project might also impact changes to community/employer perceptions about the potential ‘employability’ of young people with ID. Finally, the co-designed evaluation will enable young people with ID and their families to identify what is important to them and what success looks like from their unique perspectives.

Who are we working with?

• Teachers
• Students & Parents  
• Special Education Teachers 
• Employers 

Funding Support

• The Limb Family Foundation 

Network Research Themes

• Inclusion and Participation