Exploring Recruitment and Completion: Teacher Training and People with Disabilities The UK government is committed to increasing the number of teachers with disabilities, as part of a wider drive to remove barriers for disabled people in society at large. This paper reports part of a research project undertaken by the authors and funded by the UK’s Training and Development Agency for schools (TDA). The project was conducted during 2007. It was aimed at identifying barriers to recruitment onto Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses experienced by people with disabilities. The research uncovered insights about why there are proportionally fewer recruits to teacher training who have some form of disability than exists in the population at large. The UK has seen advances in the protection of disabled people’s interests. The Disability Discrimination Act (1995, 2002, 2005) has strengthened this movement and has lead to a closer questioning of the barriers that prevent people from entering teaching. It has facilitated the increase in supports and accommodations that enable people with disabilities to become successful teachers. However, what one government arm or department is advocating is not always echoed in other aspects of government policy. In 2007 the government education department issued revised Fitness to Teach Guidance for Employers and Initial Teacher Training providers which says ‘The onus is on candidates to prove their condition does not limit their capacity to teach’. This statement does not sit comfortably with an equality perspective, as enshrined in the DDA, which requires institutions to be pro-active in the promotion of disability equality, nor does it seem likely to engender a climate of disclosure and subsequent support. There has been relatively little systematic research on the experiences of disabled people who have applied to and undertaken Teacher Training. The recruitment process is of special interest as that is when disability may first be brought forward into the decision-making process as to whether an applicant should be accepted onto an course of teacher education. The National Foundation for Educational Research carried out a systematic review on recruitment to initial teacher training (Edmonds, Sharp & Benfield, 2002). They noted as part of the review that there had been no recent research on the issues faced by people with disabilities who wished to apply for teacher training and recommended that more research needed to be carried out. Our paper tells the story of patterns and trend in numbers of people with disabilities on teacher training courses in the UK over the last 6 years. We use descriptive statistics to explore recruitment, course completion and employment data provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the TDA. For example, our analyses show how different types of training course, such as one-year postgraduate for intending primary teachers, attract a greater or smaller number of dyslexic recruits than other courses, such as for intending secondary school teachers We look at which subject specialisms appear to attract or deter groups of people with certain disabilities. We can also give new understandings to how certain disability typologies used in data collection can be misleading.

This was stage one of a research study that went on to collect qualitative data on the barriers to recruitment to teacher training experienced by people with disabilities. The method upon which this paper is based is exploratory analysis of datasets to show trends and patterns in recruitment over a 6 year period. Datasets include census data and performance profiles.

The findings we report are one two levels: one is a series of facts that exploration of the datasets tells us, such as that certain subjects attract and certain otehr subjects do not attract teachers wich disab ikities. On a deeper level, we report findings that show hpow a surface interpretation of the facts suggests the uptake of teacher training places by people with disabiltiies is increasing, but that underlying this there is a trend towards that increase being predominantly from people with dyslexia. We question whether this is in the true spirit of the DDA's intentions.