Have your say!

As I promised in the previous entry here is the link to Disability Rights UK's 2 surveys in response to the cross Government consultation on disability issues. Please if you have the time look at my blog entry below and the information on the link above. Then any disabled person is welcome to complete the general survey whilst those with experience of leaving school or studying post 16 in the last 5 years, please complete our post 16 education survey as well!

Thank you for your time! As we disability activists used to say back in the day - Nothing about us without us!

Have your say on how to improve post 16 education for disabled people

At the moment I'm working for Disability Rights UK for a couple of days a week on education policy work. It's really interesting work and at the moment I'm looking for disabled students or any disabled people with recent experience of:

• leaving school,
• going to college or university
• or leaving education to find work,

to help us respond to a Government consultation. All you need to do if you have recent experience of the above areas is to complete a short survey. (The link and more information is below.)

The Government consultation

As you may know, the Office of Disability Issues recently launched for the Government a consultation into a cross government disability strategy. You can find out more about it here: http://odi.dwp.gov.uk/odi-projects/fulfilling-potential.php

The Government want their disability strategy to address all areas of disabled people’s lives like education, work, independent living, leisure and all of life’s events. The consultation particularly focuses on the ambitions of disabled people and how to make these ambitions a reality,

We need your help

At Disability Rights UK we want to respond to the Government by drawing on the experiences and ideas of disabled people. Disability Rights UK will be launching a general survey which covers the broader areas of the consultation but we in the education team want to find out about disabled people's recent experiences and opinions around leaving school, attending college or university and leaving education to find work. We need you to tell us how post 16 education can be improved for disabled people.

The survey

If you have been in education whether full time or part time in the last 5 years we would really love to hear from you. We have developed a very short survey which covers the key areas listed above and asks for your experiences of education and also your ideas of how things can be improved for disabled people in education after leaving school.

We can not have a credible voice or fight for change with out your support. Please if you can give up 10 minutes of your time to complete our survey you will be helping us greatly. Here is the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/disabilityrightsukpost16ed

The survey closes on Wednesday 22^nd of February

Please pass this information on to any friends that you think may also be able to complete the survey for us, they don’t have to have worked with Disability Rights UK in the past.

Thank you for your support, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any further questions or want more information.

As soon as the general and post 16 education survey is up on the Disability Rights UK website I'll post that link too but I wanted to spread the word now about our part of the survey!

East Anglia

East Anglia, a set on Flickr.

Photos from last weekend. I'll blog properly about it soon!

Snow cats

Snow cats, a set on Flickr.

Well we've had a few inches of snow which the cats were fascinated by last night as it was falling. So this morning I thought they'd be raring to go outside in it!

Kasumi was running straight out into the snow like an arctic hare. she ran around the lawn and the whole boundary of the garden.

Lumpy on the other hand did not like the snow one bit. It took him ages to venture out and when he did he skidded in the snow and looked very humiliated as his sister sprinted over to see if he was alright.

Lumpy then rather sensibly decided to only walk in my footprints where the snow was compacted. Neither of them stayed out long though, preferring to watch the snow from indoors.