Workplace inclusion software: a later edition

Workplace inclusion is a later edition of Inclusion Studio. It is not available, not part of the pilot, and has no date. This page explains why it has to be validated separately and what is different from the apprenticeship employer features that exist in the FE product.

Why is workplace inclusion software a separate, later edition?

Employment is a different legal and data setting from education. The learner support journey (Understand, Agree, Deliver, Review) may fit workplace adjustments too, but that must be proven rather than assumed.

Key differences to validate:

• Employment law. Employers owe disabled employees and job applicants the duty to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010. Section 20 sets out the duty, but the people involved are different: line managers, HR, occupational health and the employee, with sources of help such as Access to Work for eligible workers.
• Employee data. The ICO publishes separate guidance on employment practices, including information about workers’ health and keeping employment records. Employer purposes, lawful bases and expectations differ from an education provider’s.
• Power and trust. An employee may be reluctant to share health information with the organisation that pays them. Who sees what, and what happens to the information in disciplinary, performance or redundancy processes, needs careful design and clear limits.
• Occupational health boundaries. Occupational health clinicians have professional confidentiality obligations. A product must respect those boundaries and not blur clinical and managerial records.
• Different governance. HR systems, works councils or trade unions, and employment policies shape what is acceptable.

This page is general information, not legal advice. Employers should take professional advice on employment law.

What already exists for employers in the FE product?

Inclusion Studio’s pilot includes limited employer collaboration for apprenticeships. An employer contact sees only the workplace adjustments agreed for an apprentice and their own actions on them. They never see the learner’s full history, notes, documents or feedback. The training provider holds the learner record and decides what is shared. This is not an HR system, an occupational health record or a general workplace case management tool. See employer collaboration, employers and apprenticeship providers.

What could a workplace edition look like?

We have not designed it. Questions we would want answered through research with employers and employees before committing:

1. Who should lead the agreement of an adjustment: employee, manager or HR?
2. What should a manager be able to see, and what should only the employee and a trained adviser see?
3. How should reviews work so that the employee can say whether an adjustment helped?
4. How are medical and occupational health records kept separate?
5. What records should be kept, for how long, and who may export them?

These are research questions, not promises. We will not publish features, dates or pricing for the workplace edition until validation has been done.

What data boundaries would be needed?

At minimum a workplace edition would need its own data protection impact assessment, its own retention rules and clear separation from any education tenant. Employee data must not mix with learner data, and a person who is both an apprentice and an employee must see consistent, explained boundaries. See the data protection and safeguarding boundaries pages for how Inclusion Studio treats such boundaries today in the FE context.

How can I register interest?

If you work in HR, inclusion or occupational health and want to be part of early research, contact us. Registering interest does not commit either of us and we cannot promise dates or availability. The roadmap shows what is happening first, and the pilot page shows who we are working with first: FE colleges and apprenticeship providers.

Why not simply extend the FE product?

Because the risk of getting it wrong is higher for the person. A tool that works well for a learner and a tutor may do harm if a manager can see health information that the employee shared in confidence, or if a record of an adjustment is later used in a performance process. A later edition lets us start from the employee’s position and the employer’s legal context, instead of retrofitting an education product.

How does Inclusion Studio support this today?

It does not support general workplace inclusion today. Inclusion Studio is pre-pilot, with a clickable prototype using fictional learners and a production application in development on synthetic data. The employer features are scoped to apprenticeships. For help with workplace adjustments for apprentices, see Access to Work for apprentices and the solutions overview.