Start date: 1 October 2025

Working age adults with learning disabilities and/or autism (LDA) have the lowest rate of paid employment of any disabled group, yet most working age adults with LDA want to work, can work, and evidence shows that that good paid work is good for health and wellbeing. 

However, local authority adult social care services currently spend £7.5bn annually on this group but overwhelmingly on high-cost, long-term day service provision with little to no connection to employment as an option[4]. System change to enable greater connectivity between social care and employment support is urgently needed for working age adults with LDA for the benefit of individuals, their families, employers and central and local services and budgets. Important here is Supported Employment – a distinctive voluntary model of values-based, fidelity-based (SEQF), client-centred employment support tailored to the LDA population. Supported Employment offers a potential solution, has growing evidence of positive outcomes, and is the direction of policy travel through DWP’s large upcoming Connect to Work programme. 

However, key gaps in evidence and understanding exist currently that limit the potential of this increased connectivity between social work and employment via Supported Employment for this group. Open to on-going co-production with the successful applicant and external partners, the starting point for the PhD are the following priorities:

• use qualitative methods to explore experiences and impacts of Supported Employment services and employment transitions for working age social work clients with LDA and their unpaid carers;
• use qualitative methods to explore a range of issues around social work-employability system connectivity and change with frontline social work staff;
• conduct robust quantitative impact analyses of Supported Employment services on employment outcomes for working age social care adults with LDA;
• flowing from those impact estimates, conduct innovative quantitative cost-benefit analyses to examine the financial costs and savings of employment transitions for working age social work clients with LDA for central tax-benefits, local adult social care costs and client wellbeing
• deliver a programme of knowledge exchange work to maximise the real-world policy impacts of the applied research. The PhD is well placed to achieved positive change due to its close collaboration with BASE, several local authorities, and relevant central government policy departments in DWP and Scottish Government

Further information

We support flexible working and there is potential flexibility regarding location.