Employing researchers with learning disabilities

Leon Jordan, Amanda Cresswell and Richard Keagan-Bull talk about their job at Kingston University

We currently employ five researchers with a learning disability, working part-time on various projects. These colleagues are not just advisors for specific aspects of the work, but work on everything – planning, applying for funding, data collection, data analysis and dissemination. This is invaluable.

Ensuring that university staff procedures are accessible has not been straightforward, but worthwhile. Kingston University has a flexible HR department, willing to learn from us about making reasonable adjustments. We employ additional research staff with the specific remit to support our learning-disabled colleagues. We cost this into our research grant proposals, although this is usually very tight. Some of their time is funded by Access To Work.

See here for an article we wrote about all this.

We have won awards for our inclusive way of working:
National Learning Disabilities & Autism Award 2023 (“Employer of people with disabilities”)
Kingston University Inclusive Values Award 2023

Research training for people with learning disabilities

We held an 8-week research training course for 8 people with learning disabilities in Spring 2024.
You can read more about it in this blog post, written by course leader Dr Andrea Bruun.

No further courses are currently planned.

Previous course (2019)

You can find out more about it here:
Blog post (with lots of photos!)
Article co-written with 8 of the course graduates

 Short video about the article and the 2019 course