Pathways to decent work for young people with disability

We want to achieve genuine and lasting reform so that young people with disability can successfully transition from education into decent and meaningful employment.

The National Collaboration on Employment and Disability (NCED) was established by the Brotherhood of St Laurence (BSL) in 2023 in response to BSL’s vision to deliver a more inclusive and equitable society in Australia and give everyone the opportunity to thrive.

The NCED is an enabling and capability hub. This means we work with government, schools, employment services, disability services, advocates, researchers, employers, parents and carers, and young people with disability to remove barriers and enable young people with disability to get on with living, learning and working.

The NCED has evolved the work of the Ticket to Work Initiative into a national leadership role that supports collaboration and capacity building across disability and mainstream education, training and employment services so that young people with disability can successfully transition from education into decent, secure, and meaningful work.

To achieve this ambition we need to address the culture of low expectations for young people with disability and address the system-level issues that result in them falling through the cracks.

This includes:

Building partnerships and capacity in local communities across the youth employment, education and training ecosystem through Communities of Practice and local networks to enable cross-sector collaboration.
Testing and sharing new ideas through demonstration or research projects to address gaps in knowledge, services and quality across the youth employment, education and training ecosystem
Providing training and technical advice in evidence-based practices
Developing and sharing practical tools and resources and facilitating workshops and webinars
Evaluation and knowledge translation: taking scientific research and expert knowledge and making it useful and understandable for people who need it
Looking at the current systems to find how we can make the most of the resources and investments we already have
Bringing together different government departments to address shared problems and priorities
Policy analysis and making submissions to government
Communicating impact stories, emerging evidence and practice expertise, and bringing people together around a shared goal: getting young people with disability into careers they love

Our pilot project, Inclusive Pathways to Employment (IPE) , is finding ways to do this in employment services at four locations across metro and regional Australia.