Equal oppportunities for people with disabilities.

When I was a child, I saw lot of people with disabilities besides my self go through a lot of disadvantages caused by discrimination. If you could not or do things first time, you would lose out. Now times have moved on to give us the right but not enough out there just yet. Not many if not anyone with a disability could see a positive future in ourselves.

When I left school over 20yrs ago, I had not learned anything. I thought I was going to spend my life looking the four walls. How wrong was I, I have achieved a lot exams in college. Now I am helping out with Our Shout Mencap to see that other people with disabilities get what they want out of life quicker than I did with the right support.

I am pleased to say that children today with disabilities are getting one to one support in schools and in college when they leave school. Having said that with this credit crunch now a lot of support and courses seem to be cutting back. We also need to make courses more interesting. Even though Life Skills are very helpful for eg maths, English, cooking and shopping; we need to support people with disabilities more to have skills for work so they can as have a normal wage as possible the same as everyone else. The government are costing themselves twice as much money paying benefits for people with mild disabilities when more than 9 out of 10 us want to some kind of work to make us feel equal to people without disabilities.

We are all human beings just like non disabled people. We except the same rights and to be treated the same as non - disabled people. With the right support people disabilities get by, we just want people to understand that we take longer than others to get. The right to us is time. If you give us that time, you have achieved skills by giving us time to achieve ours. If you were in our shoes, you'd want people to you to do things in your own time. The training non - disabled people have got is better than it used to be but not good enough. People with disabilities have a lot of hard work to do by training non - disabled people to support with disabilities to get the same rights as everyone in whatever they want.

It will never be a perfect job, at least not very quickly anyway but Mencap and people with disabilities would like to see the future getting brighter as the years go on. The next generation should be better than the last.

Support for education and employment aren't the only topics that need to get better. Education and employment are just two examples I have used. Every support for all topics need to get better their own way. Life is full of learning, it never ever stops. We can't get everything right: it takes a long to get a lot right. If you would like to help make things better for people with disabilities please email me sarajgorman@googlemail.com or even read our Mencap website.