DRILL stands for Disability Research on Independent Living and Learning and is a five-year programme funded by the Big Lottery (£5million) to deliver the world’s first major research programme led by disabled people.

DRILL aims to bring together disabled people and their organisations, academics, policy makers and senior practitioners to co-produce and develop research programmes.  The ethos of the programme is one of co-production so that disabled people are not just involved in the research but lead the programme at every stage from outline ideas to developing and carrying our research, testing out research findings and dissemination. The programme will investigate how best services can be delivered to remove the social, economic, political and cultural barriers faced by disabled people and to enable them to take part in mainstream activities.

DRILL is establishing National Advisory Groups (NAG) for each of the four home countries and a Central Research Committee (CRC) and What Works Scotland is represented on both.  The NAG provides a country focussed body of experts to advise of the delivery of the programme and Dr Oliver Escobar has been selected to sit on the Scottish panel.  The CRC will oversee the whole programme, ensuring that the programme is coherent and that it makes a substantive contribution to the knowledge base on disability and independent living and that the blend of research will offer deep and diverse learning on some hard questions for research and for policy and practice and Professor Nick Watson has been asked to be part of this committee.