Transition support for students with disabilities

Project

The Cedar Foundation’s Transitions Service

Purpose

Supporting 16- to 20-year-olds with physical, learning and sensory disability, brain injury and autism to make appropriate choices and meet their full potential when moving on from school

Funding

The Transitions Service costs around £300,000 a year to deliver. It is mostly funded by the Northern Ireland Executive’s Department for Communities and Northern Ireland’s five Health and Social Care Trusts

Background

The Cedar Foundation started out as the Northern Ireland Council for Orthopaedic Development, which was set up in 1941 to support people with musculo-skeletal problems. The organisation has since expanded to focus on the needs of children and adults, whatever their disability.

The Transitions Service launched in 2001 with just one staff member. “We became aware of young people coming out of special schools and falling into daycare services because they were not appropriately transitioned,” says Rosie McNaughton, the foundation’s head of community inclusion. The service has grown and now has contracts with each of Northern Ireland’s five Health and Social Care Trusts.

Action

The Transitions Service now has four full-time and five part-time staff. Regional transitions officers contact schools in their area to identify children with physical, learning and sensory disabilities, brain injuries, or autism, who may need extra support when leaving school. Young people may also be referred by transitions teams run by Northern Ireland’s Education Authority – the body responsible for provision of education and youth services. Parents can also refer their children directly.

The service provides young people with impartial, confidential advice on career planning while they are still in school and on their options for when they leave. It includes support with education, training, work, getting more actively involved in the community and wellbeing. “Some young people may have lower needs –perhaps they have autism and are functioning well but there are still some concerns about how they will cope with the transition from school,” says McNaughton. “In those cases, we can deliver group workshops for young people and their parents, to give them more information.”

When young people have more complex needs, transitions officers provide one-to-one support, working with the family, the school and any other professional involved in the young person’s life.

“Staff will help the young person to consider their options. For example, they will know what courses are running locally or what local training organisations are offering,” says McNaughton. “This allows young people to make a considered choice about post-school options.” With the support of the Transitions Service, each young person makes a plan which may include a few options, depending on what qualifications they end up achieving.

Support will include face-to-face meetings, visits to training providers, colleges and universities for site tours, and meetings with tutors and accessibility advisers, who support students with disabilities to participate in university life. Support is provided for two years, starting in the young person’s last year of school. Partnership working is key and transitions officers work closely with social services, such as looking at what a young person’s care package might include if they attend university.

The project also offers a personal development programme for groups of young people, including information about career planning, benefits, and travel training. “Some will never have used public transport,” explains McNaughton.

When the young people have taken their exams towards the end of the school year, transition officers once again support them to look at their options. “Some do better than they had thought in their GCSEs and may choose to stay on for another two years and do their A-Levels,” says McNaughton. “We will then step back and re-engage later, if they are looking at university, for example.”

The service continues to support young people after they have left school, checking in to make sure their provision is working for them. “Some may drop out, often due to medical issues, and we will try to re-engage them, and take another look at their options,” says McNaughton.

Ross, 18, has autism and is one of the young people who has benefited from the service’s support.

“I was worried about moving on to college and leaving school behind,” he says. “The Transitions Service has supported me by going through transport options, visiting colleges and going through the application process.”

He is currently at Belfast Metropolitan College in his second year of an ‘independence for life and work’ course. “I’d like to get a job in the catering industry, preferably baking,” says Ross, who explains his involvement with the Transitions Service has helped him to become less nervous and meet new people.

The pandemic meant the team had to work creatively and quickly to ensure the concerns and anxiety of the young people they supported were managed as well as possible. Northern Ireland went into lockdown on Friday 20 March 2020 and by Monday 23 March the team had moved to virtual service delivery across all five trusts.

The Transitions Service team used a mixture of video and voice calls to provide one-to-one support. They worked with colleges and universities to set up online virtual campus tours and organised online workshops and Q&A sessions with guest speakers such as accessibility advisers from the University of Ulster and Queens University. Fortnightly virtual social get-togethers and activities such as quizzes aimed to ensure young people stayed connected and engaged in the transitions process.

Outcome

The service is currently supporting up to 400 young people and their families each year across 60 mainstream and special schools. In 2019/20, 323 young people received support. The Cedar Foundation tracks young people it has worked with for up to a year after they have left the service. The foundation’s latest figures show that from March 2021, 93 per cent of young people it was tracking had positive outcomes with 39 per cent in higher education, 37 per cent in further education, 16 per cent in training, and one per cent in employment. “These figures reflect challenges with Covid, which has caused a lot of anxiety for the children and young people we work with,” says McNaughton. Previously the percentage of those with positive outcomes has been 95 to 97 per cent.

Questionnaires filled in after transition workshops delivered in 2019/20 found 100 per cent of participants were satisfied with the workshops – 79 per cent were “very satisfied” – while 93 per cent found them useful. In addition, 93 per cent of parents who attended agreed the sessions increased their knowledge, confidence and understanding about their child’s post-school options.

Cedar uses a method called The Rickter Scale to measure young people’s progression towards their goals. Young people score a range of topics from one to 10 and then show where they would like to be in the future also on a scale of one to 10. In 2019/20 young people leaving the Transitions Service showed a 66 per cent progression towards their goals, up from 46 per cent in 2018/19.

What’s next?

The Cedar Foundation is seeing an increasing number of children with autism who are struggling to engage and is developing support for them outside of the existing Transitions Service. “Increasingly young people are not able to engage in mainstream school, and are out of school,” says McNaughton. “We are doing lots of work with them to build their confidence to re-engage with their community and break down the barriers that are preventing them from getting back into education, which takes time.”

• If you think your project is worthy of inclusion, email supporting data to derren.hayes@markallengroup.com