Category Archives: learning difficulties

Mencap welcomes Government SEN proposals

September 5, 2012   Carers, learning difficulties, special needs

Learning disability charity Mencap has welcomed the Government’s publication of draft provisions to improve the support for children and young people with special educational needs (SEN).

by on September 5, 2012 in News

The new publication follows on from the Government’s proposals to reform provision for children and young people with SEN in the green paper Support and Aspiration, published in March 2011, and the subsequent Next Steps document published in May 2012.

These new draft provisions provide for:

  • A new duty for joint commissioning which will require local authorities and health bodies to take joint responsibility for providing services
  • A requirement on local authorities to publish a local offer of services for disabled children and young people and those with SEN
  • New protections for young people aged 16-25 in further education and a stronger focus on preparing them for adulthood
  • Parents and young people, for the first time, to be entitled to have a personal budget
  • Further education colleges, for the first time, and all academies, including free schools, to have the same duties as maintained schools to safeguard the education of children and young people with SEN.
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The heartbreak of sending our disabled child to residential school

August 8, 2012   Carers, disability, learning difficulties

Lacking support, we have no choice but to send our daughter away for schooling, but stories of institutional abuse haunt me

 

The Winterbourne View residential care home in Bristol, where staff were caught on camera abusing patients by a BBC TV investigation.

The horror and revulsion of watching the abuse meted out to patients at the private hospital Winterbourne View was a far more visceral experience for me than for Panorama viewers last year who don’t have a family member with a learning disability. The pain was far deeper because I felt like I was watching my daughter’s future being played in front of me.

Emily is 15 now and her inner torment of the hormonal battle of adolescence, which screams out for her to detach, is coupled with her neurology of autism and learning disability that limits that detachment.

So she suffers her torment as best she can and attempts self-restraint because she’s a person of decency and inherent kindness. She’s just a teenager. How much easier for her if she could tell me to fuck off, but she can’t.

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Kirklees disability care changes that no-one knew about –

June 1, 2012   Carers, learning difficulties, special needs, ukcuts

axe falls without users and carers being consulted 

  • by Joanne Douglas, Huddersfield Daily Examiner
  • Jun 1 2012

 

A FATHER has questioned Kirklees Council’s silence over a decision to axe funding for Mencap as a day care provider for people with disabilities.

David Mills Daniel says he and wife Jenny were not consulted before Kirklees Council transferred responsibility for the care of his son from Mencap to a new provider.

And he says it will cause unnecessary disruption for those who depend of the service – the people with disabilities themselves and their carers.

His son Edmund, 33, has Down’s Syndrome and severe learning difficulties. He has attended the Waverley Hall centre, Waverley Road, for five years.

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