Having an income from a job is a major determinant of peoples life chances. Despite the UK’s buoyant economy, many individuals and groups are marginalised in the labour market. There are currently 750,000 18-24 year olds who are not in employment, education and training. Over 2 million people with disabilities are currently on Incapacity Benefit.
The focus of DISC’s employment related initiatives is centred on supporting people to engage with the labour market and gain the skills needed to develop a career.
DISC work with a range of groups including young people leaving school with no or limited qualifications, ex-offenders, recovering drug users, people with mental health problems and people with disabilites.
Our programmes are designed to offer a thorough assessment of people’s skills and potential in relation to labour market need. We then develop an individual programme of support and access to mainstream training which will take them into the labour market and help them stay there. DISC works with a huge variety of employers to ensure that the support we offer meets their needs. Most workers do work on an outreach basis, further information on this can be obtained from project workers.
The quality of all the services we run is stringently maintained from both internal and external audits. A recent Adult Learning Inspectorate report highlighted our strengths
as particularly good strategic planning and direction, very good financial planning and controls, effective management of change, effective internal and external communication systems, very good support for staff, effective initiatives to widening participation, comprehensive equal opportunities training for staff, effective approach to continuous improvement, good quality assurance procedures and thorough evaluation of feedback from service users. These qualities placed us in the inspection report as being one of the best training providers in the country.
