The British Library serves nearly half a million researchers every year, who use our St Pancras reading rooms to research projects that range from doctoral theses to novels to family histories. In addition, we organise a packed programme of exhibitions and events that attract hundreds of thousands more through our doors. We also have a website at www.bl.uk visited by millions of online users every month to explore the UK national collection of 150 million items.
A key ongoing challenge for the Library is how to meet the broad accessibility requirements faced by people within this huge user base which includes mobility access and visual and hearing impairments. In addition, among our workforce of about 2000 there is a significant number of staff members who themselves have a disability of some kind.
The Disability Equality Duty – meeting the challenge
In 2006, the Disability Equality Duty – a statutory requirement to promote disability equality – came into force[1]. It required a valid and committed three-action plan for all functions and services across the Library, which with the impact of our activities on disability equality, access and inclusion would involve a huge mapping process and an assessment of the resources required.
From the outset, it was clear we would have to meet significant challenges if the plan was to be devised and implemented effectively. How, for example, would we ensure the plan had validity, given that many users may have disabilities that are not necessarily visible to us? In a large and complex organisation with many separate public-facing teams, how would we ensure a joined-up approach? And how could we get colleagues across the Library excited in and committed to something that is too often seen as an ‘HR issue’?
This article explains the process we went through which not only transformed accessibility for our visitors and staff, but resulted in the Library winning two major awards at the Employer’s Disability Forum 2009[2].
Consultation
At the most basic level, making sure the exercise was valid meant actually asking all our internal and external disabled stakeholders what they needed. The Library’s executive team therefore put top level support behind a major consultation exercise which involved disabled service users, employees, key Library managers and staff, and stakeholder organisations such as the RNIB and the RNID.
Additionally our in house organisational consultation aimed to enhance the Library’s disability confidence. For each directorate we established a matrix to identify:
- which initiatives were working well;
- areas for improvement;
- how the directorate should champion disability; and
- how it could engage more – with users, staff and stakeholders.
The action plan
In 2007, following the consultation, we formulated our three-year action plan on disability. Commitment to implementation began with a re-launch of the Library’s disability action group (DAG) and the appointment of a director-level disability champion. The DAG had been in place since 2003, but now it had much more formal terms of reference and an action plan; it was also expanded to encompass representatives from all key areas of activity across the Library who would champion disability in their departments and directorates and ensure the plans were delivered.
We especially needed a joined-up corporate approach and expectation to disability confidence in customer services for disabled service users across all our front line services (from security and cleaning to our welcome and reader service teams). Without corporate disability confidence, disabled people could have a different experience in different service areas e.g. ranging from service provision being over zealous or inattentive to needs.
Hence, working with disabled consultants and actors, we trained 355 front line staff and built their confidence in meeting the needs of users with disabilities. Twenty-five members of staff completed British Sign Language classes (BSL1) and we also funded a colleague to do BSL2 – and she can now communicate well with both hearing-impaired members of the public and with two colleagues in her department. Now a further nine staff are completing BSL2.
Listening to our feedback from readers, access to services and products was another key area for development. We invested in assessing value, upgrading and extending the range of adaptive equipment to make our collections in our reading room more accessible which included installing screen magnifiers and enhanced keyboards.
We commissioned mystery shopping exercises to assess how successful our front-line training on disability equality was which provided excellent opportunities for feedback from service users with disabilities. The feedback, which was shared with staff, was generally positive with a few minor areas to address e.g. how we ensure agency and contracted staff are as disability confident as our regular staff.
Commitment from the top
It takes a lot more than good intentions to achieve such progress and the problem of how we engaged staff throughout the Library was in some ways the most challenging. Unless it is a corporate priority, the issue can be seen by many as someone else’s responsibility – we needed to demonstrate that this was not just an ‘HR issue’ and that people need to take ownership of it within their own teams.
Top-level commitment and leadership were essential to overcoming such a lack of engagement. Our disability champion Phil Spence provides the leadership that is critical to being able to roll out a wide-ranging plan across a large organisation. The fact that he leads a directorate that is not HR reinforces our message that disability issues are a Library-wide concern that need to be embedded throughout the organisation.
The original three-year plan was endorsed by the Library’s executive team and the HR diversity team reports formally to the BL board annually on progress. This level of commitment and profile was essential for the plan to be taken seriously and helped ensure that undertakings made by colleagues in different areas were followed through.
The members of the DAG are also key: they are champions in their own departments and directorates and their enthusiasm and commitment – and the mutual support they provide one another – has ensured that implementation of the plan happens in a coordinated and corporate manner, rather than it being a number of individuals struggling to make an impact in their particular area.
Going forward
Our next three-year plan has been developed and published on the website[3]. The associated consultation involved maintaining and reviewing the good things already achieved and looking at areas that needed to be focused on, developed and improved, including crucially, developing a mental health policy.
Central to the consultation will be the views of all disabled stakeholders such as service users and staff, but also partner organisations and disability experts - hence the project’s tagline: ‘Nothing about us without us’.
We’ll also be looking at how the wellbeing and health aspects of the disability action plan dovetails in with the Library’s much broader wellbeing strategy and where mutually-reinforcing benefits can be delivered.
There is still much more that can be done but we believe that the model we now have in place will continue to improve the many different ways in which our users, visitors and staff experience the British Library. In this way, we aim to deliver for people with disabilities the high levels of service and experience that should as standard with a great national institution.
[1] www.dotheduty.org
[2] www.efd.org.uk
[3] http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/diversity/disabilitycon/introdisactionplans2010-2012.pdf