Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi Everyone,
I am new here so you may have to bear with me. I was just wondering if anyone had any experience in dealing with the Department of Work and Pensions disability employment advisors. Long story short I have only ever had one job which a friend helped me to get and they also worked there. I was made redundant last year and have been dealing with the DWP since. I mentioned from the beginning I was autistic and had ADHD but it was ignored for some reason (possibly because the advisor told me I didn't sound autistic to her!) until a couple of weeks ago when someone made me an appointment to speak to the disability advisor. I had decided to try and set up my own business as it would be too stressful for me to go to interviews, travel to a new place of work and start somewhere I don't know anybody. I have my appointment this week and was just wondering if anyone had any experience and could tell me what they actually do. I finished last year 18 months of appealing my PIP decision and I don't think I have the energy to go through something like that again with this.
Thanks in advance
LouLou said:I was just wondering if anyone had any experience in dealing with the Department of Work and Pensions disability employment advisors
Hello and welcome to the forum. I've been reading for a while and joined recently. I used to see a disability employment advisor when out of work in 2008-09, he gave me an empathetic ear, and initially referred me to the scheme that was then called 'WorkStep' where I was meant to have a supported placement, however the provider actually put me on this other programme called 'Flexible Routeways' where there was a lot of group discussion and role play exercises that I didn't do well at and were really demoralising, like the one described on this post. The training provider claimed these role play exercises were "to coach you confidence building", of course I'd felt it had made mine worse! I appreciated it wasn't the DEA's fault but I did say I was dissatisfied when I next saw him, he could understand why I would find such exercises difficult.
The consensus on many threads is that DEAs in DWP and associated providers such as Shaw Trust have a lack of understanding of Asperger's e.g.
longman said:Or do they still know very little especially about autism?
from this thread 7 years ago. In the last post on that thread:
Deleted user said:Work Choice was meant to help me obtain work trials rather than interviews but did not do so
sounding similar to what I hoped for from WorkStep. I am guessing that might be the same deleted user as on this post suggesting that WorkChoice was through Shaw Trust.
That period of my unemployment finally ended when I was able to start my last long term job in 2011 as an agency temp when it was just a case of '(Employer XXX) need help with some data entry can you turn up and start next week', for a while it was rolling weekly temping but eventually I got a fixed-term contract and was later made permanent. Was really good until upper management decided to 'Outsource' several departments and I was made redundant November 2019.
I was then referred to Shaw Trust in early 2020 for the current 'Work and Health Programme' again with the hope that I, like the poster in the linked thread, could have got onto work trials, but then Covid lockdown hit and all I got was phone calls, and phones are the means of communication I find most difficult. Shaw Trust just kept suggesting "do online courses", "have some video-call coaching" which all feel futile as these do not get me in front of an employer and able to show what I can do. The video-call coaching was with Genius Within, I found this difficult. With my very hesitant speech, being put through Zoom calls and asked a lot of questions was difficult and I clammed up many times. I was often unable to fully think through answering one question before another would be asked.
It feels like being in such a deep abyss between being nowhere near impaired enough to be deemed an ESA/PIP case, yet too impaired to be employers' first choice and I think DEAs have little experience with those not impaired enough to be on ESA/PIP.