Disability History Month 

Disability History Month aims to explore intersectionality, disability activism, and challenge misconceptions. Disabled people make up a fifth of the population of the UK. And yet they are still the largest minority which faces discrimination in this country.

Disability Activism

This timeline showcases the progress we have made as a society to ensure disabled people have the right to work, welfare, and equality. In 2020 people with disabilities still face many barriers and we must commit to planning a future that's inclusive for all. 

In 1944 The Disabled Persons (Employment) Act was introduced, making it a necessity for firms with over 250 employees to employ a quota of disabled people. It was a gesture on paper only – not monitored, and not enforced.


Source: we-belong.co.uk

In 1970 The Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act gave people with disabilities more rights to welfare. But their access to wider society was still a glimmer in the distance.

In 1995 The Disability Discrimination Act was introduced. Race and gender legislation had been introduced in the mid-1970s, but it took another 20 years for disabled people to be recognised with civil rights enshrined in law. 

For the first time, it became illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities when it came to education, transport, employment and the provision of goods and services.

In 2010 The major principles of the Disability Discrimination Act were amalgamated into the Equality Act. The requirement for ‘reasonable adjustments’ to be undertaken remained a key aspect of the Act.

Today disabled people still face barriers across society. In physical environments, in attitudes, and in the way that information, goods and services, opportunities and spaces are provided.

What's on? 

Our GSU Officer Zoë is organising a programme of events this autumn. Please contact Zoë at z.c.campbell@greenwich.ac.uk to share your ideas, experiences and feedback. 

Recommended Resources

Jennifer Brea's Sundance award-winning documentary, Unrest, is a personal journey from patient to advocate to storyteller. Unrest is a vulnerable and eloquent personal documentary that is sure to hit closer to home than many could imagine. 

Based on these original recordings and his published diaries ‘Touching the Rock’, Notes on Blindness recreates Hull’s fascinating and deeply moving experiences through an immersive hybrid of documentary, dramatic reconstruction and highly sensory cinematic techniques and sound design. Sensitive, poetic and thought-provoking, the film charts Hull’s journey through emotional turmoil and spiritual crisis to a renewed perception of the world and the discovery of ‘a world beyond sight’.