“Do you see me?” – musings on a theme

For Learning Disability Week 2025, the theme is a powerful one: Do you see me?

I am going to approach this theme from a number of different perspectives. I believe that it is important to try and understand what life may feel like for someone with a learning disability as well as someone without, so we can connect to one another.

Historically, people with learning disabilities were often educated and supported away from their communities – sometimes in separate schools or in institutional settings. This meant that there were fewer opportunities to grow together and develop social relationships.

Nowadays, people with learning disabilities are more likely to be visible in their local communities: going to the corner shop, attending their GP practice’s surgeries and riding the local buses.

However, this proximity to others doesn’t necessarily mean that decent connections are made. Visibility does not always lead to inclusion. I still hear phrases like “they don’t want to know you”, suggesting that others do not want to get close to or interact with people different to them, because they might get embarrassed or feel uncomfortable due to stigma.

Both people with and without learning disabilities have recently told me that the public need more ‘awareness training’. In schools this could be added to the curriculum, and it might help prevent the harmful language or attitudes people with learning disabilities still experience.

I remember going to speak in a secondary school in South London in the 1980s. The students were doing a 10-week course on learning disabilities, and in week 6 they met Sarah*, a passionate self-advocate, and me.  When we asked the students for questions at the end of our talk, no one put their hand up. Over tea and biscuits afterwards, one of the female students said quietly to me, “I’ve got a sister like Sarah*”. I suggested that she go over and talk to her, and they hit it off straight away. She hadn’t felt confident enough to say this in front of her peers though.

Another person recently told me, “Nobody knows I’ve got a learning disability until I tell them”. The fact that many of us have ‘hidden conditions’ is these days recognised more widely. Transport for London (TfL)’s excellent blue-coloured “please offer me a seat” badge and card reads “remember not all impairments and conditions are visible”. 

People with a wide variety of conditions and learning differences are also more visible and positively displayed on TV these days. ‘The Assembly’ on ITV is a great example of the collective energies of a group of people demonstrating their creative talents, humanity and humour, and inviting others onto their turf.

The last words go to Sedley Wilson, a member of the SCIE Fliers, a group of self-advocates who have worked on a three-year project to challenge inequalities in health and care…

“Can you see me? We live in the same community. But he refused to see me. But we get on the same bus every day. Is it because you don’t want to see me?”