About Diversity Training Options (DTO)

DTO's Proprietor, Kaye Long, has provided training to a wide range of organisations in both the private and public sector, including the Department of Children, Schools & Families (DCSF) and over a decade of annual sessions for Bristol University first year Social Work students. She worked as a National Equality and Diversity facilitator for Shaw Trust (the largest UK Voluntary Organisation supporting disabled people into employment), and still delivers training for the Trust on a consultancy basis. Kaye is skilled in designing, developing and delivering training courses and awareness interventions, to ensure effective engagement and learning solutions.

As a disabled person, Kaye is able to run training courses using her personal experience of society's disabling barriers, providing a positive role model for many course participants who may have encountered disabled people only as users of their services.

In recent years, many public and private sector bodies have gradually realised that their work practices and policies fall far short of fulfilling the needs, rights and aspirations of disabled people who are their clients, customers and co-workers and that in order to change this situation, they need to turn to disabled people for education and guidance. From this realisation has grown the demand for Disability Equality training run by disabled people, which aims to help people understand the meaning of disability, identify changes in work practice, and plan strategies to implement change.

Kaye is an associate diversity advisor for Capita, and a trustee for Bristol MIND. In addition, she is working on a consultancy basis for Shaw Trust.

Why use DTO?

Being a flexible employer can mean you get the best out of your staff. Whether it understands childcare needs, flexibility for people with disabilities and long-term health conditions, on the whole, you get back what you put in. Making sure that you can recruit and retain the one in five people of working age who are disabled in the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) isn't something you should do just because there's a law about it or because it's a good thing to do. It can:

• Make your workforce more representative of the community it serves
• Avoid undervaluing, under-using or losing competent staff
• Help to develop good practice that improves customer care as well as your employment practice.

Get in touch to discuss your training arrangements.