Help to move on - but to what? Young people with learning difficulties moving on from out-of-area residential schools or colleges

Abstract

Accessible summary Some young people with learning difficulties go to school or college a long way from home. They live at their residential school or college most of the time. They only go home in the holidays. It can be difficult for young people when they leave these schools or colleges. Pauline Heslop and David Abbott worked on a project called ‘Help To Move On’. They found out what happened when young people move on from their residential school or college. • Most young people had to go back to their home area when they left school or college. • Sometimes going back to their home area caused problems. They hadn’t lived there for two or three years. Services weren’t set up for them there. They didn’t have any friends there anymore. • Some young people didn’t know where they were going next. They had to leave school or college but they didn’t have a place to go to. They didn’t have plans for things to do in the daytime. • A few young people got good support. Workers listened to what they wanted to do. They visited different places. They moved somewhere they liked. They knew some of the people in their new place. They had lots of things to do in the day. • The main thing that young people said helped with all the changes was that there were good links between their school/college and the places that they were moving on to. Plain facts A summary of the research is available in the Plain Facts series. Plain Facts produce research findings in illustrated plain language formats. For a free Plain Facts summary, please contact Marilyn Baker at the Norah Fry Research Centre, University of Bristol, 3 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TX. Summary This article describes research undertaken between 2004 and 2006 about the issues faced by 15 young people with a wide range of learning difficulties in out-of-area residential schools and colleges at transition. The process of transition planning was hampered by the distance between the school/college and the ‘home authority’ of the young person; there was a wide variation in who took the lead on co-ordinating planning for transition; and involvement in decision-making by the young people was often a passive, rather than active process. Four of the fifteen young people left their school/college without knowing where they were going to move on to. None moved into any accommodation other than the family home or residential accommodation. Half moved on to attend a mainstream FE college, with little or no sense of future progression into work for most. The key messages of the article relate to the importance of continuity to young people, the need for more creativity in minimising the effects of distance, and how vital good forward planning is to help young people ‘move on’.