Originally published here.

Having a job has increasingly become identified as a qualifying condition for citizenship,according to the policy documents and political rhetoric of the UK and other governmentsacross the developed world (Rauch and Dornette, 2010; Patrick, 2012). This potentiallyincreases problems for people with learning disabilities, who face particular difficulties ingaining and keeping employment, and potentially could increase marginalisation (Baldwin,2006).

Several initiatives by the English Department of Health (DH) and Department for Workand Pensions (DWP) have been put in place to promote employment of people with learningdisabilities. A demonstration site project called Jobs First was one of these initiatives. Thisarticle reports on part of the evaluation of Jobs First, (Stevens and Harris, 2013).The project termed Jobs First aimed to increase the numbers of people with moderate tosevere learning disabilities, who were all eligible for publicly funded social care, in employment.

This was to be achieved by setting employment as the primary goal of social care interventionin five participating local authority sites. The project was announced in Valuing EmploymentNow, (DH, 2009) and supported by the DH team responsible for this policy, suggesting a highlevel of government enthusiasm for this goal at that time. Jobs First also chimes withpersonalisation of adult social care and other public services, a dominating theme of policy andpractice over many years (Stevens et al, 2011). Personal budgets are key means of deliveringpersonalisation in adult social care. This approach may replace care services with a cash budgetmanaged by the person or their family. Personal budgets can also be managed by socialworkers, who work with people and their families to make decisions about how to use theresources available. One main aim of the project was to demonstrate whether and how peoplewith learning disabilities could use their personal budgets to pay for help to find a job, get to it,do the work and help with any other practical or support needs, a process sometimes known as job coaching.Jobs First can be seen as a particular kind of Active Labour Market Policy (ALMP). This is a termapplied to policies implemented across many countries that aim to increase participation inpaid employment and reduce reliance on welfare benefits (the degree of emphasis on thesetwin aims varies from country to country). These policies tend to involve a mix of support andcompulsion (Newman,2007). In the UK ALMP has been noted as having taken a more‘workfirst’ approach, with lower levels of welfare benefits, tighter conditions on their receipt and lessemphasis on support. While a wide range of support is available for disabled people,increasingly strict criteria are being placed on eligibility for disability related welfare benefits.

Social workers in England have typically focused on supporting decision-making and findingways to assist people to achieve goals, or to identify suitable sources of support to maintainquality of life. For people with learning disabilities, social work practice and services havetraditionally been concerned with empowerment and increasing ‘inclusion’ in society, usingmethods such as person-centred-planning (Cambridge, 2008), often drawing upon diferente anti-oppressive frameworks (Baldwin, 2006). Since the closure of long-stay mental handicaphospitals in the 1960s - 1980s, many studies have illustrated different approaches to improvingsocial inclusion in leisure and social activities (Forrester-Jones et al, 2006). A critique has beendeveloped about the roles of social work in overcoming exclusion, through creating special community based services, and focussing too much on meeting individual needs (Zaviršek,2009) at the expense of addressing structural elements. This echoes the debate between amicro individual approach and a focus on challenging structural factors that create andreproduce poverty and social problems (Hugman, 2009). While there have been efforts toencourage people with learning disabilities to gain employment for many years (Beyer andKilsby, 1996), Jobs First represented a change in the priority given to employment. However, aninterpretation of ALMP that emphasises support towards employability might be seen as alogical development, enabling social workers to think about working with people to supportthem in operating as full citizens, through employment where possible.In many European countries social workers are implementing ALMP through agencies such asthe Belgian Public Centre for Social Welfare  or German Jobcenters  (Künzel, 2012; Raeymaekers and Dierkx, 2012). These organisations are the equivalent of Jobcentre Plus in the UK.Raeymaekers and Dierkx (2012) describe how approaches taken by social workers in theseagencies vary between a narrow focus on applying pressure on people to take any job and stopclaiming welfare benefits and a broader objective, in which ‘their goal is to promote the(re)integration of the client into society’ (p2). In the UK, Jobcentre Plus workers are not socialworkers. Their approaches appear to focus more on getting someone to take any job, withother kinds of support being reduced (Etherington and Ingold, 2012). While these authors notethat Danish policy has also introduced more workfare like elements, the UK has developedmuch more coercive measures than most other European countries (Daguerre and Etherington,2009). As a result of this conceptual, organisational and occupational difference in ALMP, UKsocial workers might be expected to find the idea of refocusing social work and social careintervention on employment to be potentially oppressive of disabled people. This articleexplores the responses of social workers and their role in supporting people with learningdisabilities to get paid employment, in the Jobs First sites. The Discussion section makes somesuggestions on how this understanding may improve employment outcomes. It concludes witha consideration of implications for social workers in the light of the emphasis on employment asa goal of public policy and as a route to full citizenship.

This evaluation has highlighted the key role played by social work in supporting people withlearning disabilities to get jobs. First, the importance of social work attitude and support for theidea of employment was stressed, suggesting that social workers are still very influential figuresin the lives of the people they work with. This is an encouraging sign of the significance of socialwork in adult social care. The attitudes displayed by some social workers in the evaluation (boththat work was good for people with learning disabilities and that it was something of a moralduty) supports the notion that social work, as a profession charged with implementing statepolicy, plays an ‘educational, if not a downright moral role’ (Lorenz, 2001: 596).

Second, thepractical role they played was often limited to initial assessment, aimed at working out aresource allocation and ensuring that support plans were accepted by local authorities forfunding, although this is a necessary role. As suggested above, this continues a trend for socialwork with adults to be much more a coordinating, managing role, rather than working directlywith individuals to support choices. Further research could usefully explore the value ofdifferent professionals taking on the various aspects of the process.

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