limited to Long, your job opportunities on craft activities in workshops. Now, you can qualify the mentally handicapped as lecturers.
Miriam Hoffmeyer
What does work for you?” the lecturer asks the 15 student teachers, sitting together in a seminar room in a circle. On a poster the answers will be listed: make money, social recognition, experience, personal development, social structure, Cohesion. An ordinary beginning of a pedagogy of seminar – only that not a single lecturer has appeared, but six, which alternate each other every few minutes. Two of them are sitting in a wheelchair. And all of them have an intellectual disability.
Helmuth Pflantzer worked a year ago as a doorman at the Heidelberg workshop of the Lebenshilfe. “I was satisfied,” says the 44-Year-old. “But I knew: There’s more to come. And then the big Chance came.” Since November 2017 Pflantzer is qualified at the school of social work at the Johannes-Diakonie Mosbach to “education specialist”. The idea: people with intellectual disabilities, teach future educators in their everyday life and their life-world. Not by “demonstrated”, but actively and with professional standards.
the struggle for inclusion
“thousand students dumber, because Henri is sitting there?”
In the three-year qualification of the participants, such as labour market and education system in Germany, people work and what rights disabled people have to learn. On the other, they deal with the techniques and practice of education: presentations and Workshops to create, prepare, perform, reflect. The Seminar on the topic of “work” is the fourth of the mentally disabled teachers of the Pedagogical University (PH), Heidelberg, Germany.
the aim is to create for the participants subject to social insurance jobs
the objective of this project is to create after the qualification for the participants subject to social insurance jobs. When a model and cooperation partner of the Johannes-Diakonie Mosbach, it worked: the University of Kiel, affiliated to the Institute for Inclusive education forms for 2014 mentally disabled people to Education professionals, the first Year is now finished and at the Institute on a permanent basis. Jan Wulf-Schnabel, head of the Kiel Institute, told of the enormous progress made by the participants in their personal development: “A is at his first Seminar after ten minutes, exhausted, asleep in the wheelchair, a year later, he spoke quite confidently in front of 400 students.”
The six-Heidelberg participants were selected from among 40 applicants. Because, of course, people with an intellectual disability in terms of individual skills, Motivation and resilience very differently. Not everyone is suitable for this training. The 28-year-old Anna Neff, the sorted earlier screws in a sheltered workshop in Schwarzach, in the Odenwald, and has Packed, commutes daily now and for longer than an hour to qualify to Heidelberg. “It is exhausting – in the evening I’m exhausted. But it’s fun!”, she says.
The project shows how big the opportunities for development through vocational education can be. Opportunities that are denied to the vast majority of those Affected. To the extent that they work at all, this happens almost exclusively in workshops for disabled people. Who goes there, by a input method, up to three months, it is checked what kind of employment is out of the question runs. This is followed by a two-year vocational education and training, in which people get to know different fields of work of the workshop. After that, Betkanyon no training is provided. What Employees learn, is mostly limited to short training sessions, about Gabler forklift or a new machine can operate.
career decision for a lot of, too early
Andrea Stratmann is a Board member of the Federal Association of workshops for disabled people. The regulations for the vocational education and training considers them to be obsolete: “they come from a time in which the world is still fine sorted by Enabled and, allegedly, Incompetent.” It is not clear that people with disabilities had only two instead of three years of professional education. “In addition, many of these people are in delayed development and late know what you want to do. Then the topic of vocational education and training is abgevespert but a long time ago.”
Helmuth Pflantzer, Anna Neff and her colleagues are able to participate in qualifying, only because the school of social work has been declared as the “outer work” of their workshops for the disabled. You will continue to receive the low workshop wages, without having to perform any work. However, the workshops need to cover part of their costs on the free market.
the value of mediation
Who should teach the children?
Demanding vocational training is financed, therefore, difficult to, says Andrea Stratmann. They are in favour of an individual education budget for disabled people, similar to the “Budget for jobs”, which was introduced in the context of the Federal part of the act. Since the beginning of this year, it is available to facilitate workshop employees Transition to the social insurance-liable Jobs. From the Budget for work subsidies to the employer and the personal support at the workplace to be funded, but not education spending.
rights and duties – like everyone else
“The need for training in the workshops is huge,” says Heinrich hoping, Professor of special education at the Catholic University of North Rhine-Westphalia. “Some of the carriers of the workshops have enough well-trained staff and are very committed. But a lot needs to change – the awareness of the institutions, the teaching, the resources.” In many workshops, the supervisor would need to develop a better understanding of the importance of vocational education and training. “In every city, in every carrier, it’s different”, accounted for hoping.
This also relates to the question of whether and what financial statements can be forgiven: Some, but not all, of industry and Commerce and chambers of crafts working together with workshops for the disabled and certification of partial qualifications. So that Employees can demonstrate that they have mastered specific content of a training professional in the areas of horticulture, maintenance or catering. This can facilitate the job search outside of the workshop.
The training of the mentally Disabled to Education professionals will be offered in other German cities: in the course of this year, the first year courses in Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden, and Stendal. In the Seminar for student teachers at the PH Heidelberg and the disabled lecturers at the end to summarize again, what is the meaning of education and of the work for you: “That man has rights and duties like everyone else.”
Inclusion Initiative
Approximately 310 000 people were employed nationwide in workshops for disabled people. About three-quarters of them have mental mental, 20 per cent, and other sensory impairments. In order to be included, you must be disabled according to the workshops regulation of 1980, in the position to provide a “minimum amount of economically usable performance”. Workshops, employees have only a “quasi” legal status. You receive very much less than the minimum wage, but are non-redeemable. Many workshops do Assembly and packaging work on behalf of industrial customers. Also, work in the garden and kitchen, or Laundry Services are typical fields of work. The UN disability rights Convention provides for a right to work “in an open, inclusive and accessible labour market and work environment”. Separate workplaces for disabled people are criticized by many experts and associations, as an inclusion obstacle. Although the workshops have the job, your workers on the first labour market, prepare, and succeed most of the exchange only for each Hundred. As more people work than in the past after a serious accident or because of a mental illness in sheltered workshops, these have grown in the past years, instead of shrinking. Since 2013, the Federal working community of workshops for disabled people (BAG WfbM), the educational offer of the workshops is trying to improve across the Board. Each employee is to be allowed for individualized training, the content should align to recognised training occupations. Whether and to what extent these guidelines have improved the practice, is unclear and is currently being evaluated in a comparative study of the University of Würzburg. MIRH