Support-related Barriers
These may include:
The disabled person is supported by a care worker, personal assistant, or advocate, but that individual is not interested in sport and doesnt want to spend his/her evenings watching sport whilst the person they are supporting participates.
Someone who is Deaf/hard of hearing wants to access one of you coach education workshops and needs a sign language interpreter to attend. This would be too expensive for the organisation and make the workshop cost-prohibitive.
One of your coaches contacts you for further information about additional workshops s/he can access, because they dont feel the existing coach education qualifications provided appropriately equip them to coach disabled people.
The membership fee for members affiliation is one fixed price (with a lower price for juniors). You have had some feedback from your clubs that this seems to prevent disabled people from joining, because the price of membership is too high.
You are finding it difficult to attract disabled members to your clubs because parents and carers are saying that it is too dangerous for their children/clients.
Appropriately providing support, and creating suitable support structures are essential in order to attract and maintain a membership. This is no different when that membership comes from communities of disabled people; however the range and impact of the types of support barriers experienced by the membership might be quite different to those experienced by the non-disabled participants in your club system.
Possible solutions to support-based barriers:
Encouraging people who aren’t interested in sport to get involved is one thing, but when that lack of involvement not only impacts on them, but also on another individual (i.e. the care worker’s, personal assistant’s or advocate’s client) who might very well be interested, just not able to get appropriate support to come to the club/session, then that is something else. There are a number of things which may help alleviate this barrier:
o Provide refreshments (tea and coffee perhaps) for the care workers, personal assistants, or advocates in an area close to, but not in the sporting environment so that they can socialise whilst their client participates in their sport
o Encourage the care worker, personal assistant, or advocate to get involved with the club in some capacity; whether it be participating (if appropriate), or supporting them to get a leadership/coaching/officiating qualification/award do that they can help out at the club. Obviously ensure that NGB guidelines for safe recruitment are followed.
o Specifically tell the care worker, personal assistant, or advocate the extent of the impact participation is having on their client’s health/wellbeing/performance.
It is fantastic that members of the Deaf community are interested in accessing your workshops. The Equality Act 2010 identifies that you have a legal obligation to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to practice and procedures so as to ensure that disabled people have appropriate access to your provision. However, if providing a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter for one individual on a workshop will mean that the workshop is no longer financially viable, and that as an organisation you are unable to access or provide funding to support this, it may be that this adjustment is not considered ‘reasonable’. If this is the case, an appropriate alternative would be to market a number (maybe 2) or your workshops a year to the Deaf community and provide a BSL interpreter for those workshops – you may well find that the number of people who use BSL and want to attend your workshops increase.
Within some NGBs this is far more common a concern than we would imagine. The vast majority of coach education workshops provided through NGBs make no explicit reference to disabled people, and therefore coaches who have attended them assume that they are not qualified to work with disabled people. Some NGBs do have specific add-on workshops which coaches HAVE to do in order to coach disabled people, and if this is the case, the coach should be sign-posted to this opportunity. If your NGB has no additional training, then sign-post your coaches towards the FDSW UK Disability Inclusion Training workshop (which is aimed at leaders through to L2 coaches). sports coach UK also run a couple of workshops; ‘How to coach disabled people in sport’ (aimed at people new to the sports environment) and ‘Inclusive Coaching’ (aimed at those who are established L2 coaches; previously this workshop was ‘Coaching disabled performers’). As a more long term solution to this FDSW are keen to work with NGBs to support them developing inclusive coach education. Please contact eandt@fdsw.org.uk for further information.
It is important to bear in mind that whilst cost might be a significant barrier to some disabled people; it may not be an issue at all to others. A common assumption is that ALL disabled people are on incapacity benefits, and this is completely untrue; whilst some will be, others will be in full time, well paid employment. It is therefore important to think carefully about your membership pricing policy, so as to ensure that those people who need it are financially supported. Some organisations operate an ‘honesty-box’ approach and enable members to identify what level of membership they should be paying (i.e. disabled or non-disabled member (in receipt of benefits); or disabled or non-disabled member (employed)), other organisations provide a blanket reduction to all disabled members as a means of taking positive action to engaging more disabled members.
Some sports are perceived to be dangerous, and each NGB will have different strategies to educate the public about the reality of that danger/risk. The key is being realistic and providing sufficient information to the right people in order for them to understand that risk assessments are done, and risks are controlled through that process on order to ensure that participants are as safe as possible. If parents/carers/advocates/guardians/participants do consider a sport too dangerous because that individual has an impairment then spend some time going through this with the individual, or refer them to a role model if one exists already within the sport. The answer to addressing this barrier is perhaps not significantly different in a disability sport context than in a non-disability sport one.
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