The accessible electronics laboratory

The Disability Discrimination Act requires schools, universities and colleges not to discriminate against disabled students and to make reasonable adjustments. Laboratories are an integral part of all engineering courses. Therefore they have to be accessible to all students and reasonable adjustments should include making laboratories accessible and not excusing disabled students from them. Adjustments to make laboratories more accessible to disabled students generally benefit all students and staff. Making laboratories accessible increases the pool of talent that can be attracted into the engineering profession. Many disabled people have had to exercise a lot of ingenuity to cope with an inaccessible world. The engineering profession could benefit from this ingenuity

An Analysis of the Service Provider’s Legal Duty to Make Reasonable Adjustments: The Little Mix Saga

The recent dispute between a mother and organisers of a Little Mix concert is a controversial issue for the entertainment industry. Although the Supreme Court decision in Paulley v FirstGroup plc 2017 UKSC 4 has attempted to clarify this duty placed on service providers, the law still remains unclear whether this duty involves access to an experience enjoyed by non-disabled individuals. It is argued that this is partly due to the legal uncertainty of the reasonable adjustment duty contained in the Equality Act 2010 . This intervention will discuss the dispute in detail as it leaves service providers unclear as to what is, and is not, a reasonable adjustment for the purposes of discharging their legal duty to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 . Any ruling in this case might clarify the nature of the duty and the extent to which an organiser is required to make reasonable adjustments for disabled individuals where the core service is an ‘experience’. How far this duty extends remains uncertain. The author will consider how the failure to make reasonable adjustments may in some cases exclude disabled service users from mainstream activities enjoyed by non-disabled individuals. Theoretical models used to explain disability will also be explored to assist in understanding the duty owed by a service provider

"Reasonable adjustments" in relation to disability and social justice for children and young people in an inter-professional context

Under the wider policy framework as framed primarily (amongst other documents and acts) by the Every Child Matters agenda (DFES, 2004), the Removing Barriers to Achievement (2004) document, the Disability and Discrimination Act (DFES, 2005), Aiming High for disabled Children (2007) and the Lamb Enquiry (2009) that lead to further publications on parental confidence and involvement, the reasonable adjustments duty has become even more prominent for schools and settings in England. The reasonable adjustments duty has become statutory since 2007 and plethora of supportive material has been available to support settings on the implementation of what could be seen as a far more social orientated model of disability. This poster will communicate the findings of a qualitative, small-scale project under the umbrella of ICCIP (Institute for Child Centred Interprofessional Practice, Kingston University) that investigates those processes in action by exploring discourses and practices relating to ‘reasonable adjustments’ as used and understood by different stakeholders, front line workers (teachers, TAs), multi-agency service providers, school management teams, parents and the children themselves -for whom the adjustments have taken place. Shared values, beliefs and preparedness for inclusion verse exclusion will be explored through the above stakeholders’ voices. Method The study is in line with a qualitative interpretative research paradigm and aims a) to identify issues that will frame the research agenda, b) to explore in-depth the experiences of different stakeholders of reasonable adjustments in an inter-professional context, c) to gain a better understanding of the personal/social outcomes of these adjustments through the voice of the child. In the context of this project three primary school children from one-form entry inner-city primary school in London were selected. Each of the selected children has been part of the school’s inclusion register for an identified additional educational need or disability and their inclusion has required some kind of reasonable adjustment. One important aspect of the methodology of this project is the focus on service-user involvement and participation. Not only is one of the researchers also a service-user, but participants are invited to influence the direction of research in this and future projects, in line with the many advantages of this process outlined in the recent INVOLVE report (2009). Expected Outcomes The voices and experiences of stakeholders will inform a discussion about the need perhaps for a response along the lines of a ‘social pedagogy’ found in large parts of Western Europe and Scandinavia were education would be something much more than schools. It is based on a fundamentally holistic concept of children and adults in which the teachers concentrate on teaching but not in isolation (Whitney, 2007). Following this project, there is also scope for creating a network of stakeholders from different settings/boroughs on issues of inter-professional practice to promote positive and innovative examples of successful reasonable adjustments and their sustainability within a social model of disability. Possibilities for parent participation and possible parent forums will be explored, in line with recent government guidelines (Davies, 2010)

Revisiting the phenomenology on the QCD color dipole picture

Using the QCD dipole picture of the hard BFKL Pomeron, we perform a 3 parameter fit analysis of the recent inclusive structure function experimental measurements at small-$x$ and intermediate $Q^2$. As a byproduct, the longitudinal structure function and the gluon distribution are predicted without further adjustments. The data description is quite reasonable, being timely a further study using resummed NLO BFKL kernels along the lines of recent theoretical developments.Comment: Contribution to the ``International Workshop on Diffraction in High-Energy Physics'' (DIFFRACTION 2004), Cala Gonone (Sardinia, Italy), 18-23 September 2004; 3 pages, LaTeX fil

Equality on the Bus: Case Comment on Paulley v FirstGroup Plc

The Equality Act 2010 imposes a duty on employers and organisations to make sure that disabled people have easy access to education, jobs and services. This ensures that they are treated equally with non-disabled people. Over the years, employers have been looked down upon for failing to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people by both the EHRC and judges. There seems to be much more focus on how and why employers should treat disabled people equally, leaving organisations and service providers behind. As a result, there has not been much deliberation on how far service providers should go when making reasonable adjustments for disabled people. Paulley v FirstGroup Plc is the first case of its kind to discuss the duty upon service providers to make reasonable adjustments to their services for disabled people. It has therefore been quite a contentious case, attracting mixed opinions from academics and disability and equality supporters. This article sets out the key facts of the case, followed by the judge’s reasoning, judgment and analysis. Essentially, the main question the decision in this case raises is whether it has struck a balance between disabled people’s rights to freedom from discrimination and the reasonable adjustments that service providers are required to make

Recent Developments in Cointegration

It is well known that inference on the cointegrating relations in a vector autoregression (CVAR) is difficult in the presence of a near unit root. The test for a given cointegration vector can have rejection probabilities under the null, which vary from the nominal size to more than 90%. This paper formulates a CVAR model allowing for multiple near unit roots and analyses the asymptotic properties of the Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator. Then two critical value adjustments suggested by McCloskey (2017) for the test on the cointegrating relations are implemented for the model with a single near unit root, and it is found by simulation that they eliminate the serious size distortions, with a reasonable power for moderate values of the near unit root parameter. The findings are illustrated with an analysis of a number of different bivariate DGPs