A chance for everyone

As the Paralympic Games show the world what people with disabilities can achieve, the importance of giving disabled young people opportunities to realise their potential has never been clearer.

Ofsted has been conducting a review of the state of youth work opportunities for young people with disabilities across the country. The study is one of a number of themed reports the inspectorate is making in the absence of individual youth service inspections.

The report will be published later this year and will examine young people’s learning and development, identify effective models for delivery, and consider the support and workforce development needs of staff and volunteers.

David Wright, chief executive of the Confederation of Heads of Young People’s Services, says the exercise is critically important.

“Ofsted is no longer conducting inspections of individual youth services,” he says. “But anything that provides a review of the quality of the experience young people are getting is really important – people will be able to see what is good and remedy things that are not.”

Wright says the provision of activities for young people with disabilities has always been a priority for local authorities, but the study will show whether the quality of provision is consistent across the country.

As an initial scoping exercise, Ofsted visited a number of high-achieving local authorities to establish the benchmark standards against which to measure best practice. Here, we examine the practices in three of these authorities.?


Nottinghamshire
Twenty-year-old Laura Hickman has Asperger’s syndrome. She attends activities at the Folkhouse Young People’s Centre in Mansfield, including a forum for disabled young people that supports the development of new services and inspects existing services.

Laura contacted the youth service after telling her school transitions worker that she would like to make more friends. “I find it hard to communicate,” she says. “Before I went to the disability support team, I never had any proper friendships. Here was the first time I felt I could use my voice to be heard. Without the youth club, I think a lot of us would not be doing as well as we are. It’s more than a youth club.”

Young people with disabilities were heavily involved in the design of Folkhouse centre, which has benefited from a £6.5m refurbishment with funding from the Myplace scheme and the council.

Chris Warren, group manager of Nottinghamshire young people’s service, says: “They made choices we would not have made – in this age of inclusion, we wouldn’t necessarily have built a separate area in the club, but they wanted an area to be with their peers.” 

Ofsted’s inspector praised the way Nottinghamshire’s youth centres were equipped for disabled users and was particularly impressed by the opportunities for residential activities, during which disabled young people are supported to move towards independence and build relationships through activities such as preparing food together. The county runs holiday activities and a residential programme for 350 13- to 25-year-olds with moderate disabilities.

Community venues and schools also host Saturday and holiday clubs for 400 five- to 14-year-olds with more complex disabilities and life-limiting conditions.

Ofsted highlighted the regular needs assessments that take place to make sure any gaps are identified, and to enable the continuing development of staff who run sessions.

There are plans to integrate a health clinic into the youth centre, which Laura is pleased about. “Seeing a doctor can be scary,” she says.

Helping young people with disabilities to secure employment is also a central strand of Nottinghamshire’s work. Its youth service runs a work-based learning programme for 16- to 19-year-olds with disabilities at six locations across the county, giving them the chance to gain work experience and practice their social skills. Forty-five young people have gone on to secure employment or further education since the scheme started.

Nottinghamshire runs some sessions and groups targeted at young people with disabilities, as well as supporting young people to access mainstream provision. Its disability support team sits within the council’s young people’s service.

“We have always had a strong focus on mainstream open access work – young people choose to come and work with us, which is different from lots of places that have moved towards more targeted work,” says Warren. “We work with children’s social care and health, but we can work with young people in a different way because of the relationships we can build.”


Bath & North East Somerset
Bath & North East Somerset has seen an increasing number of young people with additional needs access its youth services in recent years, and puts this growth down to the way it builds relationships with families and encourages them to visit its youth hubs.

Peasedown Youth Hub in Bath was singled out by Ofsted as “an excellent example of well-planned, highly effective youth work”, bringing together young people with and without disabilities, but providing extra help for those who need support to access activities.

Jess McConnell has cerebral palsy and diabetes. She says staff at Peasedown support her to take part in everything: “I have made loads of new friends and get the chance to take part in loads of activities with my friends. This is good as we all go to different schools and colleges. The staff at the youth club are really great and help me when I have problems, as have the friends that I have made through the club.” Her mother Gill McConnell adds: “Jess would be at the club seven days a week if she could be.”

One young woman with epilepsy and autistic spectrum disorder wanted to join in a cake-decorating project at the centre, but was nervous about being bullied. After looking around the centre on a quiet evening with her father, she joined the project. She has since started an award scheme, made a video of what she feels she has achieved so far, and become involved with planning the next cooking project. Youth workers at the centre say the young woman has become more confident, socialises well and improved her communication and listening skills.

Disabled young people are supported to access the whole range of mainstream activities, including projects where they can learn about mechanics and drive go-karts. Nathan Hartley, Bath & North East Somerset Council’s cabinet member for young people, says: “Everyone is given the opportunity to take part in any activity at the youth hubs and the young people all work together regardless of any specific needs.

“This has been particularly useful for those young people from special schools, offering them the opportunity to work with other young people from a range of backgrounds and experiences.”

Some groups are created specifically for young people with additional needs, such as the Youth Action Group for Access, made up of disabled young people aged 13 to 19. Workers will also run separate sessions for young people with disabilities if they ask for this.

Hartley says: “The Life Skills group has played a large role in developing the confidence of young people. The group equips them with the skills to become more independent and encourages them to put these skills into practice. This has been particularly important as the young people we work with in this group are all facing transition points such as leaving school or college and are not yet entirely confident of making the transition into the workplace.”


Rochdale
When Rochdale’s youth service identified services for young people with disabilities as a priority, it sent a youth worker to the local special school to work with young people in the sixth form and find out what they wanted.

“We were able to meet young people in an area they felt comfortable,” says Jayne Taylor, senior youth officer at Rochdale Borough Council.

The resulting additional-needs Saturday club at Springvale youth centre was praised by Ofsted as “a first-class example of the impact and relevance of well-planned youth work”. Taylor says the main aim of the club is to create a “safe and secure” place.

“A group of young people runs the coffee bar, others help to set the building up. Young people are making choices for themselves. Often other people are making choices for youngsters with disabilities, but we find the more responsibility they are given, the more responsive they are, and making decisions in a safe environment will help them develop the skills they need.”

Young people with disabilities are also encouraged to attend mainstream provision. Ofsted noted that “disability work appears as both a discrete and an integrated aspect of the youth service’s work”.

While some young people with disabilities sit on the borough-wide youth forum, the youth service is using money from the government’s short breaks funding scheme to fund the development of a specific forum. A group of young people are set to attend a residential to “put meat on the bones” of the forum, says Taylor. “It is an opportunity for young people with disabilities to have a voice in shaping their services,” she explains.

The youth service has developed strong links with the borough’s arts and sports trust Link4Life, which runs the Sunsport and Saturday Klub programmes offering a variety of activities for young disabled people.

The biggest challenges facing provision are funding and staff training, says Taylor. “Some specialist projects are run by more experienced staff, but our aspiration is that every worker has expertise and training, as all activities and projects are open to everyone,” she says. “We want to develop training for staff around young people with more complex needs – at the moment their parents or carers have to come with them as staff don’t have the knowledge or experience.”