This is a summary of an article written by Tim Corcoran, Ben Whitburn & Lizzie Knight which recently appeared in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education. The article explores the barriers for student with disabilities to professional careers that are imposed by higher education institutions.

Inherent requirements in higher education: locating You in Us.

It should not take a global pandemic for higher education institutions to re-examine their relationships with community. But in what might hopefully be presaged a post-COVID-19 world, universities are doing just this. The dominant topic, in Australia as in many countries around the globe, is how government might support higher education to further develop collaboration with community and industry. Such a push comes at a time when government resourcing of higher education is diminishing and the marketisation of knowledge and ideas is presented by politicians as the common-sense means to financial stability. The challenges facing higher education management and policy makers post-COVID-19 are pronounced. All aspects of practice have been affected, many deleteriously so. Yet, out of uncertainty spring conditions for change. In years to come, 2020 may be looked back upon as a turning point for how education and vocation are made possible. We repeat, made possible. Educational and vocational exclusion or inclusion are not natural conditions of the world. Instead, instances of either are affordances of the relationships we value and sustain.

BARRIERS TO PROFESSIONAL CAREERS

Enrolments of students with disabilities in higher education in Australia have increased steadily over the past two decades. Yet, conjecture about the application of inherent requirements, which can prevent students in some circumstances from entering professions of their choosing, endure. Concerned with the application of inclusive education policies in higher education through the COVID pandemic, this paper published in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education offers higher education administrators, academic course managers and industry partners three thinking points to enhance their solicitation and design of inherent requirements. These involve (i) foregrounding ethics in matters of integrity; ii) orienting differently to disability, and iii) questioning qualification to employment guarantees. Drawing directly on these orientations, recommendations for practice are made by way of an example, wherein static inherency is replaced with an affirmative ethic of difference and the relational responsibility for enacting equity. The paper centres the argument that inclusive education can no longer be measured on enrolment quantifiers alone—how higher education providers create opportunity for all learners to study and transition to employment must surely follow. The approach advocated provides a way that higher education providers can utilise inherent requirements to increase social justice and equity, rather than perpetuating homogeneity upon the world of education and work.

IRs perpetuate ableism as they force homogeneity upon the world of education

In degrees which are validated by a professional body, graduates do not have a generic sheepskin but instead are awarded entry to the professional body. Even in programmes where the course is validated by an authority and there are no further training requirements to practice, there is usually a step between graduation and registration with the professional body. These steps almost always involve fitness to practice requirements which frequently involve matters like ‘good character’, judged in a very perfunctory way in the carceral state by police checks, and ‘medical fitness’ which is judged using the medical model described above. Often there are not mechanisms for disabled people to prove alternate ways of meeting medical fitness nor is there facility for reasonable adjustments. As course providers and professional bodies seek efficiency in practice, each wanting to avoid candidates doing a degree in a profession they will never be admitted to, involving IRs is enforced gatekeeping on behalf of the course. Our point is a reasonably simple one. IRs perpetuate ableism as they force homogeneity upon the world of education and work. Instead of recognising value in diversity for our communities, IRs mandate exclusion. Instead of acknowledging You in Us, IRs actively signify deficiencies. Evidently, the best institutions have been able to do is ignore the prospect that reasonable adjustments may be no more than veiled attempts at rehabilitative ableism. Is that genuinely the best higher education can do?

As we have argued in our Perspectives paper, IRs are a fitting place to concentrate effort. They are fitting because they remind us of the perpetual paradox inherent in the pursuit of equity in education and inclusive society.

Read the full article: Tim Corcoran, B. Whitburn & E. Knight (2021) Inherent requirements in higher education: locating You in Us, Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13603108.2021.1986166