How Policy Must Be Built to Work for Disabled Staff

[cross-posted from my work in WhoCares, https://whocares.ed.ac.uk/]

Work Package One, part of WhoCares, starts with the most fundamental question in disability governance:

How does policy need to be designed, structured, and embedded so that it actually works for disabled staff — not just on paper, but in everyday practice?

Universities often assume that writing a good disability or reasonable-adjustments policy is enough. WP1 shows why this isn’t true. A policy is only one component in a much larger system of recruitment, onboarding, HR procedures, line management, IT access, estates, health & safety, culture, and communication. If any part of that system fails, the policy fails with it.

What WP1 Does

WP1 maps this whole system — the “policy machine” — using approaches borrowed from systems engineering, aviation safety, and human factors. It looks at:

  • The policy itself: clarity, structure, responsibilities.

  • The policy network: how related policies reinforce or contradict it.

  • Implementation chains: who needs to know the policy and who actually does.

  • Human factors: workload, communication breakdowns, unconscious bias, norms, and the predictable ways people misinterpret, forget, or avoid policy.

  • The labour of inclusion: the hidden work disabled staff do because the system hasn’t been designed around them.

The aim is to diagnose where disability policy collapses: not at the level of legal compliance, but at the point of lived experience.

Why This Matters

Disabled staff do not experience “a disability policy.”
They experience the entire ecosystem around it.

A policy will only work if:

  • it is known,

  • it is understood,

  • it fits coherently into the wider policy environment,

  • it can be implemented by staff with the time, training, and resources to do so,

  • it accounts for human fallibility,

  • and it does not rely on disabled staff to constantly self-advocate, educate, chase, or correct the system.

Most UK universities currently fail at several of these points, creating a wide implementation gap: the difference between what the policy promises and what disabled staff actually experience. WP1 analyses why that gap exists — and how to close it.

What WP1 Contributes

1. A systems-based blueprint for policy that works.

Policies must be written and embedded like engineering systems: with defined subcomponents, interdependent parts, and checks that each part is installed and functional.

2. Human-factors insight into implementation failure.

Policy collapses not because people are malicious, but because they are overloaded, undertrained, distracted, or following local norms. WP1 uses human-factors models (including aviation’s Dirty Dozen) to analyse these predictable failure points.

3. Practical strategies to reduce the labour of inclusion.

WP1 identifies how policies must be designed to shift the workload off disabled staff — through better communication, automatic prompts, universal design, resource allocation, and built-in accountability.

In Summary

Work Package One provides the evidence base for building disability policy that actually works.
Not symbolic. Not aspirational. Operational.

It shows that effective disability policy isn’t one document — it is a functioning system, explicitly designed to overcome human factors and implementation gaps. And when that system works, disabled staff don’t just get support: they get equity, dignity, and the chance to do their work without carrying the extra labour that the system should carry for them.