Press Release

RESEARCH PROJECT TARGETS BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

11 May 2007

NATIONAL charity Shaw Trust’s important new research project will help thousands of young people struggling to kick start their working  lives.

The ‘Young People with Learning Disabilities - What Works?’ project, which is unveiled to MPs and the media at the House of Commons on Monday (May 21), will culminate in a blueprint Good Practice Guide for parents and education authorities when research is completed later this year. But early findings already indicate that it’s not the level of learning disability that hampers young people’s progress from  education to work, it’s the lack of effective work experience support.

“Initial results suggest that supported work experience organised by partner employment organisations (rather than by schools), and specific employment awareness courses organised by schools, are  important predictors of a job as an outcome,” said research team head Dr Stephen Beyer, Deputy Director of the Welsh Centre for Learning Disabilities at Cardiff University.

“We’re still in the middle of follow-on research, but it seems that effective involvement of employment agencies is critical if employment as an option is to be made available to school leavers.”

Shaw Trust, with funding from the Big Lottery Fund, commissioned  Cardiff University to conduct the research, prompted by concern about the future prospects of young people who fall through the support network. The research is examining the barriers to education and employment faced by young people with learning disabilities and the success of the current range of programmes available.

The charity had already urged the government to take swift action after figures from the Office for National Statistics indicated a sharp rise in the number of people aged between 15 and 24 who are neither in education, work or in a training scheme.

“The problem, for disaffected young people and those with learning difficulties and other disabilities is piecemeal funding and the lack of a nationwide directive,” said Tim Cooper, Managing Director for the Work and Independence Division of Shaw Trust, which provides employment services for those disadvantaged in the job market by disability, ill health or social circumstances.

“We know there’s a better way, from the success of our own Young People’s Services projects, where we work with local authorities and schools to provide support and work placements to help young people move on into paid employment.

“We’re not banging the drum for our own projects. We are saying that  we need a national programme to ensure that no young person falls through the net.”

The research project is investigating six different approaches in transition planning and intervention to gauge the effectiveness in securing employment and social inclusion for young people with Learning Difficulties. A purposive sample of 147 young people, leaving schools in 2005 and 2006 and who had experienced one of the six different transition approaches, are being monitored.

The team is finalising follow up studies on the young people’s  progress after leaving school, which will give feedback on the long-term effectiveness of the six models.

Stephen Beyer and his team have already presented papers based on the early research to international educational and disability experts who were invited to offer feedback at a conference in Maastricht in the Netherlands.

The final report, to be produced later this year, will be followed by a policy conference in the autumn. The team plan to produce academic  papers on the subject, as well as a good practice guide.

* The Office of National Statistics recently reported that the number  of 16 to 24 year-old NEETs has increased by 15 per cent from 1.08m in 1997 to 1.24m in 2006.

* Disabled young people are considerably more likely than non-disabled people to be not in education, employment or training  (NEET), particularly from age 19 when many will first transfer out of  special school (Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (2005) ‘Improving the  life chances of disabled people').