Why not start with another quote! We don’t know if you’re read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery but, if you have, you’ll know it’s a poetic tale about a young prince that falls to earth from an asteroid. The young prince meets a fox in the story. The fox sums up the story of The Little Prince when he says to the prince “One sees only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

What has that got to do with developing Disability Action Plans you may be wondering? Well, apart from being a nice poetic way to start this episode, there’s a point to it that’s relevant here.

An effective Disability Action Plan is a great thing and can make a huge difference to inclusion when it is implemented well. But it’s rarely the panacea to all the challenges of inclusion. It cannot be the magic recipe that suddenly makes things happen. It’s a guideline. A document that sets out, logically and sequentially, how best to create more opportunities for people with disability. There are plenty of things that will be invisible to the Plan. It’s important to keep that in mind and not be stuck too strictly to the words that are in the plan.

This also emphasises the point that an effective Disability Action Plan needs to be a dynamic document. Not a document that is created and then left alone. It needs to change over time and reflect the current status of actions.

So what does an effective Disability Action Plan look like?

There is good news and bad news here. Let’s start with the bad. There is no template or format that is the best for a Disability Action Plan. There isn’t a recipe. Not one single example that we can say is the ‘number one’ model. But the good news is there are plenty of really good examples we can look at that should help formulate your own plan. We can also look closely at these examples and cherry pick the common elements that you might want to incorporate into your plan.

We’ve had a look at a lot of Disability Action Plans. From national organisations to local level organisations. What we have come up with three of the best examples of what an effective Disability Action Plan looks like. Take a look at these—you can download them by clicking on the images below.

Here you have three examples of an effective Disability Action Plan.

Take your time and look through these. They are all very comprehensive and have varying levels of complexity, depending on their own circumstances. What we have done is pick out some of the common key elements of these plans and put them into one template for you. The template is in a Microsoft Word format so you should be able to use it as a basis for your own plan. We have geared this template more for a local level sport and/or recreation club, rather than a national organisation or government authority.

It is with some nervousness that we provide you with a template for a Disability Action Plan. Templates can be good and bad. Good, because they really can help save you some time and set you down the road quickly in developing your own plan. Bad, because it’s easy to simply copy this and use it verbatim as your very own plan. Simply copying the template helps organisations abdicate the responsibility to go through the proper process of developing their unique plan. But, we trust you will not do this – so here is your template to get you started.

First, download the template and then watch the video below that takes you through the key elements of the template and how to use it.

Download

So, hopefully the template above at least gives you and your organisation a kick-start to developing an effective Disability Action Plan. An effective is a powerful thing and can lead to significant change—well beyond the immediate strategies and actions contained in the plan.

Good luck with yours. If you have experience in developing a Disability Action Plan for a sport or recreation club/organisation then please let us know by leaving your comments below.

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