Supporting Neurodiversity Celebration Week

Neurodiversity Celebration Week

Enable and our self-advocates are supporting Neurodiversity Celebration Week. This is a time to recognise the strengths of neurodivergent people.

We also want to look at the progress we have made in the fight for legally recognised rights for people with learning disabilities and neurodivergence in Scotland.

 

The challenges people still face

About 20% of people in Scotland are neurodivergent. But too many still face barriers in daily life.

For example:

• Less than 7% of adults with learning disabilities have a paid job. But for the general population, the number is almost 75%.

• Only 5.3% of school leavers with additional support needs go to university. For non disabled school leavers, the number is 41.5%.

 

 

 

Rights Now

Rights Now is a campaign powered by Enable, led by self-advocates and supported by Acorns to Trees.

It calls for the Scottish Government to introduce the:

• Learning Disabilities, Autism and Neurodivergence (LDAN) Bill &
• the Scottish Human Rights Bill

 

These would protect the rights of people with learning disabilities and neurodivergence. They would also help make sure Scotland follows the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

Throughout 2024, we held lots of events to talk to people about our campaign. We spoke with almost 200 Enable members, with learning disabilities, about the need for these Bills and what they would like to see included in them.

How the LDAN Bill would help

The LDAN Bill would make real changes to improve people’s lives, including:

• Training for public service workers so they understand neurodivergence.
• Better communication support, including Easy Read information.
• A legal duty to collect data so policies are based on real needs.

How the UNCRPD would help

People with learning disabilities are often left out of research and statistics. If there is no data, governments struggle to make the right decisions.

Bringing UNCRPD into Scots law would change this. It would force public bodies to collect and use data to create better policies.

People with learning disabilities and neurodivergence have rights in law. But too often, it is hard to assert them and put them into practice in day to day lives. Our self-advocates tell us it is not as easy to get social care support, find meaningful employment, or to get involved in their communities as it should be.

The incorporation of the UNCRPD would also give people with learning disabilities the power to hold public bodies accountable if their rights are not upheld.

We are working together

We have not done this alone. Our campaign began in partnership with Scottish Autism and the National Autistic Society Scotland in the 2021 Scottish Elections. We joined forces to launch ‘Our Voice, Our Rights’. This was a campaign calling on political parties to make a promise of delivering an LDAN Bill.

We still work together now. Recently, I spoke at the Scottish Labour Party Conference in Glasgow, alongside Jim Gault, a member of the National Autistic Society and the convener of the Scottish Government’s Lived Experience Advisory Panel for the LDAN Bill.

What next?

The Scottish Government has promised to introduce an LDAN Bill. As time ticks on, it looks less likely we will see this before the next election. But we must keep up the pressure to make sure it is on the table in the new Parliament after May 2026.

Enable and our National Self-Advocacy Forum will continue to empower people with learning disabilities and neurodivergence to champion the need for these two new laws.

This Neurodiversity Celebration Week, we celebrate how far we have come. But we also remind everyone—the campaign for Rights Now is not over.

Together, we can make Scotland a truly inclusive, accessible and equal society for everyone with learning disabilities and neurodivergence.