At NDS’s 2024 Disability at Work Conference in Sydney this week, reports on two important disability employment projects were discussed. One defines Customised Employment in an Australia disability employment context and the other is a Supported Employment Modelling project conducted by Taylor Fry on behalf of NDS and the Endeavour Foundation.  

Peter Symonds, the consultant commissioned to undertake the Customised Employment report, led a panel presentation on Day One of the conference on the theory and application of Customised Employment as outlined within the report.  

Hugh Miller, a Principal at Taylor Fry and David Swain, the CEO of the Endeavour Foundation, discussed the findings and implications of the Supported Employment Modelling Project on Day Two of the conference. The report will be launched soon.  

Customised Employment 

In Australia, Customised Employment (CE) has been an underutilised employment service approach. The Disability Royal Commission recommended that the CE should be made a core component of Disability Employment Services (DES), raising its prominence in the disability employment reform debate. 
 
NDS commissioned the consultant Peter Symonds to better define the CE model for service providers and identify what participants expect from a CE provider. The project also examined the development and use of CE models overseas, as well as investigating local understanding of CE principles and how they are applied. 
 
CE consists of values-based principles aligned to key strategy elements and a set of phases, each with its own descriptor of good practice. Service providers would generally be familiar with the phases of the CE model: 

• Phase A: Participant discovery 
• Phase B: Informational interviews (or organisational discovery) 
• Phase C: Interviews for job design and placement 
• Phase D: Individualised job setup 
• Phase E: On-the-job training and ongoing support. 

The report recommends that: 

• “Customised Employment” is adopted as the Australian benchmark descriptor and universal definition. 
• The principles, elements and phases of CE are formally recognised and adopted. 
• An agreed and consistent evidence-based framework be adopted alongside the definition. 
• There is rigorous data collection to support outcomes and identify the cost and time required of the approach. 
• A series of controlled pilot projects is held in a range of provider settings with a variety of participant groups to test the approach and produce peer-reviewed evidence and supporting data. 
• Workforce capability is supported through the development of a training and peer mentoring system, including aligned micro-credentials and comprehensive training. 

The Taylor Fry Supported Employment Modelling Project 

The Taylor Fry Supported Employment Modelling Project examines four key elements: 

• The supported employment workforce of 17,000 employees. 
• A wage offset policy, which subsidises the gap between current and minimum award wages for employees with disability in open and supported employment. 
• A social wage policy, where welfare benefit income is deemed part of an employee with disability’s wage. 
• A calculation of the net economic benefits delivered by supported employment and an update of the economic benefit formula used in the BuyAbility economic and social impact tool. 

The report will be released soon in conjunction with our project partners,  the Endeavour Foundation.  

NDS thanks Peter Symonds and Hugh Miller and his team at Taylor Fry for their excellent work on these two projects. 
 
The report on Customised Employment is published on our website, soon to be joined by the Taylor Fry report. We encourage members to familiarise themselves with the findings of the two projects. As well as the full reports, there will be summaries for members.