Early Help and Support for Disabled Young People and their Families

This one-day course aims to help you develop skills around making effective holistic assessments and plans to support disabled young people alongside their parents or carers in a whole-family approach.

This course is aimed at anyone who might take the lead in Early Help planning and works together with other agencies.

This could include any workers involved with disabled young people and their parents/carers:

• Early years workers
• Social care and support workers
• Health
• Education
• Youth and criminal justice workers
• Any workers involved with Education Health and Care Planning

Aims of the Early Help and Support for Disabled Young People and their Families Course

• Consider the significance of effective early help intervention and where it fits within both policy nationally and locally but also the significance it holds for a family.
• Reflect on the meaning of the impairment for the young person’s development.
• Explore development of capacity and resilience.
• Consider what disabled young people need from parents and carers.
• Consider the challenges of multi-agency work.
• Consider the issues, assumptions and challenges which increase risks.
• Develop skills in finding out what disabled young people want and need with a focus on the need to take the long view and think holistically about early intervention.

The Early Help and Support for Disabled Young People and their Families Course will explore the following areas:

• Views and experiences of disabled young people
  Developed awareness that the views and experiences of disabled young people may be missed.
• Involving young people in decision making; how and where does this start? How can we improve young people’s abilities to have a say
  Developed understanding about ways of communication and the importance of involving young people in decision-making earlier in their lives; building resilience and capacity.
• Whole-family approach
  Developed awareness of the importance of a whole life, whole family approach while also maintaining a focus on impact on the subject young person.
• Siblings
  Considered how siblings’ needs may be affected.
• Barriers to accessing help
  Considered barriers to accessing help and support early enough to prevent lasting harm.
• Multi-agency working
  Considered effective multi-agency team-working; Develop skills in seeking and listening to young people’s views in whichever form they are communicated.
• Education Health and Care Plans, Early Help Plans, and working in the space between unmet needs and harm;
• Consider challenges, stresses and barriers to asking for and receiving help faced by disabled young people, their siblings and their families.
• Consider the role of early help in reducing increased risks of harm and abuse later in the young person’s life
• Reflect on the human rights of disabled young people and the extent to which our practice seeks to uphold these.