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Road to Employment is a three-year [National Disability Insurance Agency] NDIA funded project (April 2020 to March 2023) implemented by Purple Orange in South Australia. The project uses a lifecycle approach from childhood to adulthood to change work expectations about people with disability. The premise of the project is that the way the community thinks about and perceives disability needs to change for people with disability to participate equally in education and work and reach their full potential. One component is to work with employers to increase their capacity to address barriers in their work practices to create work opportunities and inclusive cultures. The project's second component is to work with schools to raise expectations about work for teachers, parents and students and mentor students. A team of researchers at the [Social Policy Research Centre] SPRC, University of New South Wales and Flinders University in Adelaide are undertaking an action research approach to evaluate the impact of the project on stakeholders and the lessons from the project for future similar projects.

This interim report is about the project implementation up until September 2021. The project is half-way through its implementation and has established all its activities with employers (Community of Practice groups (finance and aged care), and the business inclusion mentoring) and most of its activities with school communities (development and delivery of co-designed Raising the Bar workshops with audiences in schools (parents, teachers of pre-school aged and year 5, 6 and year 9 students). In the interim report we identify four aspects of the project that appear to be central and important to its success to date, namely: (1) relationships and stakeholder engagement; (2) co-design and leadership of people with disability and lived experience in all parts of the project (from design, implementation to leadership); (3) structured governance and management to maintain oversight and connection of the various Road to Employment activities; and (4) formative research and evaluation and reflective practice that are part of most activities undertaken by the project and staff.

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10 years after its implementation, we explore the equality reach of the 40 per cent Norwegian gender quota regulation for boards of public limited companies (PLCs) using a multi-strategy approach (administrative data and interviews with women directors) to capture interrelated macro and meso changes. We employ Acker's (2006) inequality regimes as our analytical framework, augmented by the 'equality reach' concept. We found strong compliance with the 40 per cent Quota. However, there was little evidence of voluntary spillover to limited companies as envisaged by Quota proponents; instead Quota coverage reduced as some PLCs changed status to avoid the Quota requirement. We reveal that positive equality reach in one of the most equal countries in the world is confined to a PLC 'quota silo', which has shrunk over the life of the Quota. Moreover, we suggest that PLC high levels of compliance may be a defensive strategy seen as necessary in the regulatory/high sanction context of the Quota. We demonstrate the need for further political and organisational interventions to improve equality reach beyond the quota silo. We also show the value of the equality reach concept for research on equality interventions and warn of the dangers of an intervention leading to an equality silo.

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Australians with disability of all ages experience barriers to finding and staying in work. The majority of people with disability can and want to work, given the right support, encouragement and opportunities. Transition points, such as leaving school and starting new employment, are times when people benefit from tailored guidance, mentoring and workplace supports. Road to Employment is a 3-year Department of Social Services (DSS) funded project from April 2020 to March 2023, with an extension to June 2024. Road to Employment applies processes to increase employment opportunities, improve employment practices and influence work expectations for people with disability. Road to Employment applies a life-course approach to address barriers to employment for people with disability. It recognises the growing evidence of the role of attitudes towards and of people with disability during childhood and adulthood and how attitudes can affect employment outcomes later in life.

The Road to Employment project works with employers, with schools, students and families to change employment expectations of people with disability. To achieve these outcomes the project applied processes such as: leadership, lived experience, and co-design by people with disability; developing and investing in relationships and connections; iterative reflection and review and flexible project management; peer group (industry) driven change goals (like the traineeship model or the accounting and finance inclusion toolkit); providing an external facilitator perspective; and 'hands-on' inclusion support to employers. This is the final report from the research. The evaluation was from April 2020 to March 2023.

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The Australian Government Department of Social Services Disability and Employment Sector Reform Branch commissioned a comparative study of outcomes across a variety of employment support types for people with intellectual disability in Australia. The study focused on the perceptions and perspectives of people with intellectual disability working in open employment with support from Disability Employment Services (DES); supported employment through Australian Disability Enterprises (ADEs); and social enterprise employment. Fifty-one people with intellectual disability working in these employment types from Sydney and the Northern Rivers participated in accessible interviews. They were asked about their experiences of choosing, finding, maintaining and changing employment and about their likes, dislikes and outcomes from working.

The implications of the findings in relation to experiences of choosing, finding, maintaining and changing employment for people with intellectual disability include: (1) the need to have a range of employment opportunities available to them when job seeking, with support to choose between options; (2) the need to have both personal and systemic-level support for making employment choices; (3) an awareness that it is acceptable to change jobs if they wish to, and to be encouraged to do so, and availability of support to ensure they are making informed and supported choices about changing their employment type; (4) employers in open employment need further encouragement to appreciate and understand how critical both personal supports for workers with intellectual disability and education towards cultural change in the broader workplace are as elements supporting people with intellectual disability to maintain their employment; (5) policy needs to address the limitations and constraints on funding in DES to allow assistance with education, capacity building and building employment expectations; and the policy framework needs to further enable social enterprises as an alternative work option for people with intellectual disability; and (6) improving employment outcomes should be considered one of the reasons for and factors in improving conditions in the entry-level and/or low-skilled end of the labour market in general.

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