A Day in the Life: Sarah's Journey

It is essential to think about what the phrase 'barriers to education' means before talking about my own education experience.  barriers can be attitudinal, organisational or practical  Although it is important to remember that sometimes there is no way to do this due to the nature of the disability and the experienced problems. As a result, each individual should be treated differently and their needs addressed in the same way. The barriers to learning faced by students with disabilities are many and complex and differ from student to student and often daily. So, for this article, I will be only writing about my own experiences and understand that this may be very different to what others may have experienced. When looking at access, you need to think about all aspects, not just physical; these include: Access means physical access as well as access to the curriculum Awareness of the needs of disabled people and the barriers they may experience Acceptance that y...

Writing helps me to share my views as well as become an outlet for me on an emotional and psychological level. I am a woman with a physical disability and as a person with a disability, it can often be a challenge to have a voice in society. Writing gives me a voice that allows me to share my experiences that will hopefully in turn help others. I found it almost impossible to write for a while, but now realise this is exactly when I should have been writing the most. I am going to try and explain some of the reasons I stopped writing and then discuss why I now realise I should have continued to write all along. October 2015 my life started down a road that there was no stopping and turning around on. I had been unhappy in my marriage for some time, as the years progressed it became evident that we wanted different things. I had always said that I didn't want children, not because of my disability but just because I enjoyed my freedom, wanted to see the world and didn't see a ch...

The issue of Access is often a contentious one, if you talk to someone with a disability then there is always problems with not enough being done, yet if you talk to people in authority there are always excuses as to why more can not be done. I appreciate that there are times when it is not possible for there to be access to something be it the physical limitations of the person themselves (e.g. rock climbing) or through buildings being so old that they can't be adjusted enough to be fully accessible. Although this is the case, organisations will often hide behind 'reasonable adjustment', expecting disabled people to just accept that as much is being done as possible. As mentioned above, I appreciate there are some limitations with buildings that are really old and that I will not be able to get everywhere that I may want to, but I still feel that often more can be done than is currently being done so. Companies should want to do as much as they can to include everyone (at ...

I am currently in Torquay with my husband who is a teacher for the annual conference for the National Union of Teachers. Although everything seems calmer now that is not how my experience of this weekend started. It started before the weekend when I did some research into the hotel we were staying at (the room was through a block booking and so did not have the same control). I decided to look into it for my own peace of mind and glad I did. The hotel we are staying at is the Rainbow International and all information I found on-line did not fill me with confidence that it would be suitable. As a result my husband contacted the hotel for me on my behalf to ensure that it was suitable for my needs. When he rang up, he was reassured that we were to get the fully accessible room and that we would not be moved. This room was designed around a specific person and although this is the case we were guaranteed to be getting this room due to my specific needs and being more physically impaired ...

Welcome to my new followers, I am looking forward to some interaction from my followers as some already have. I have had an interesting weekend and some things I have heard through twitter has made me feel the need for another blog post. Some of the main topics being discussed include how disabled people are seen as 'benefit scroungers' and that of the experiences of disabled people and transport. I have spent time in previous posts speaking about how the media shows disabled people as benefit scroungers and so am not going to try and reinvent the wheel with that one. Instead I am going to discuss my experiences of public transport. I have mentioned this topic but not at great length and so feel it is appropriate to focus a whole post to this topic. As previously mentioned I have been disabled from birth and so have experienced public transport in many different circumstances. When I was younger I was very reliant on being driven everywhere that I went. Many of the buses were...