We’re committed to helping you feel safe and comfortable

The University prioritises the health and wellbeing of our colleagues, including providing support to those who are disabled or who have a physical or mental health condition. Where appropriate, this includes putting in place reasonable adjustments. We offer a Workplace Passport which captures your reasonable adjustments, so that you don’t have to explain your needs again if you change roles or you have a new manager.

We work with external partners such as the Business Disability Forum and internal colleagues to make sure our environments, policies and practices are inclusive. We do all we reasonably can to create an environment and recruitment process where people feel safe and comfortable to talk about disability. This can help towards: 

• Making sure disabled people get support and are not put at a disadvantage or treated less favourably.
• Recognising the benefits of an inclusive and diverse workforce that does not exclude disabled people.
• Recruiting and retaining staff who often have more resilience and problem-solving skills through developing ways of living with a disability.
• Avoiding situations where an employer does not know that someone is disabled, and this is impacting on them carrying out their role.
• Improving wellbeing and productivity for everyone.

Disability Confident Scheme

Durham University are proud to be a Disability Confident Leader (previously called ‘Two Ticks’), a scheme which aims to help organisations successfully employ and retain disabled people and those with health conditions.

We welcome applications from candidates with disabilities, neurodiversity and long-term health conditions, and we are committed to ensuring fair treatment throughout the recruitment process. If you need any reasonable adjustments to the process, please let us know.

Disability can mean different things to different people. It may include you, if you have a physical or sensory condition, a long-term medical condition (including medically recognised mental health difficulties such as depression or anxiety disorder), or a neuro-diverse condition, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD or Autism.

We will interview a fair and proportionate number of applicants who apply under the Disability Confident Scheme, where they have evidenced that they meet the minimum essential criteria for the job role.

There may be instances where it is not practicable or appropriate to interview all applicants that meet the minimum criteria for the job and who have applied under the Disability Confident Scheme. We may limit the overall number of interviews offered to both applicants who have applied under the Disability Confident Scheme and non-disabled people in recruitment situations where there is a high number of applications, and/or in seasonal and high-peak times.