Background: Supported Employment has been advocated for by successive governments and policymakers alike as the best approach to employment inclusion for people with an intellectual disability who are in receipt of social care. Yet only 5.2% of this demographic are in any form of work and these numbers have been persistently stagnant for many years.Aims: This study aimed to explore the employment landscape and grapple with the intersecting layers of policy consequence for people who have an intellectual disability, and are in receipt of social care, who wish to engage with work preparation employment support.Methods: As an active participant in the field, this study was ethnographic and conducted at a new job club that had been established in England. In addition, three further sites of complementary data were explored in Wales, through interviews and focus groups.Findings: This study demonstrates that there is a mismatch between how evidence informs policy, and how funding is allocated to support with work preparation. Those unable to secure Supported Employment services are, instead, navigating extreme employment disadvantage and scant opportunities, in the open labour market. Further, bound up in this analysis is evidence of a non-universal understanding of waged work where any form of financial remuneration is welcome.Discussion and conclusion: Overall, with a mismatch between evidence that informs policy, policy rhetoric, realistic employment prospects, and available work, without a fundamental employment policy shift, the very low employment rates within this demographic will not increase.<br />Key messages<ul><li>People with intellectual disabilities can experience extreme employment exclusion;</li><br /><li>There is a mismatch between how evidence informs policy and the allocation of funding and work preparation support;</li><br /><li>People with intellectual disabilities can be taken advantage of and work for little or no pay;</li><br /><li>Ethnographic research methods can capture complex and nuanced data to support social change.</li></ul>

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This article uses ethnographic data to explore the relationship between a job club facilitator and a job seeker with an intellectual disability, to illuminate the gulf between employment activation and the multifaceted everyday reality experienced through employment preparation activities, at a job club established for people with intellectual disabilities who are in receipt of social care. The focus of this article is the micro-interactions apparent within the job club that aligns with Goffman’s ‘cooling the mark’ framework, which is unpacked and extended. The strategies at play here refute the broader, individualised ‘welfare-to-work’ neoliberal rhetoric of employment being available to anyone who works hard enough to attain it. Instead, job seekers are reoriented to accept volunteering roles or dubious unpaid work which are presented as employment-like alternatives. Yet, Goffman’s concept is not static as he envisaged: it fluctuates. For, within this reorientation process, strategies are deployed onto individuals to ensure they are kept interested enough to both accept a lowered employment status, while simultaneously still encouraged to strive for paid work one day. As such, this article teases out the tension and paradox between the clusters of promises attached to work as ‘the good life’ together with everyday disabling experiences of cruel optimism by encouraging job seekers to accept non-normative forms of employment.