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Part Three: The process of consulting young people with complex support needs
Young people who took part in consultation
The term 'complex needs' covers a wide and complex range of support needs arising from a range off different factors. The consultation exercise needed to ensure both breadth and depth of coverage so that the views of one group did not take precedence over others. For example, it would not have been enough simply to consult those with complex needs but who could speak. Therefore to ensure coverage we took into account:
- The range of support needs
- Young people's college experiences
- Range of local authorities
Range of young people's support needs:
In this consultation exercise it was important to seek the views of those who are not normally consulted as they are the people who have most to gain from the outcome of the consultation. We therefore approached:
- Young people who need some support to access college such as HNC, HND etc. but who are or were, at the time they attended college, capable of independent study and learning.
- Young people with full linguistic communication through sign ( BSL), complex voice output communication device, or other communication aid, Braille, other Augmentative and alternative communication ( AAC) support needs
- Combination of complex global support needs due to sensory, physical, communication and behavioural factors, including severe learning difficulties
Young people's college experience:
The young people we consulted included:
- Those who had been to college
- Those who were planning to attend or are attending
- Those who want or wanted to attend but cannot or could not get a place
In all, twenty seven young people gave their views as well as several parents. These figures were supplemented by information from head teachers, teachers, speech and language therapists and staff from colleges. Most of those consulted who were not young people were working with the young people at the time the consultation took place. These discussions supplemented what the young people told us.
Range of local authorities
Individual young people as well as small groups were approached in schools and colleges based in several local authorities. These are noted in Part One of the report.
The process of consulting people with communication support needs
It isn't straightforward to consult people with communication support needs on matters of policy, and it is time consuming to do so. Many will not be able to access text and so few will respond to standard consultation questions. While it is relatively straightforward to convert a document into Braille (though not always), on which Braille users can then comment, making information accessible to people who don't use text is more complex. Some of the factors that need to be thought through in advance are the time it will take and background knowledge needed to:
- present information in alternative formats that are accessible to different groups
- structure the language used for questions
- decide which questions are most relevant for people who may find it difficult to think in the abstract. For example, if you haven't gone to college, the questions about experiences at college cannot be answered unless you can respond to 'what if' type questions. At the same time reasons that people could give for not having gone to college might be the most informative to the consultation. So questions need to be presented in different ways so as to attract different people's experiences (went to college, thinking about going, applied but didn't get a place and so on)
One of the groups often not consulted are those with complex communication support needs, in particular those who use augmentative and alternative communication, for example in the form of communication aids or communication books. In order to encourage their participation in the exercise we needed to consider how best to present text to them. To engage this group we produced a synopsis of the document rather than a full symbol-for-word or phrase version of it (which would be too long and complicated). The synopsis needed to take full account of familiarity, the symbol system(s) in use, whether colour or black and white is used, along with many other factors. We explain this process in a little more detail below.
Synopsis versus full consultation document
The difficulty with a direct conversion of consultation documents into symbol form is that the actual language (ie vocabulary and sentence construction) used in the original may be inaccessible to those consulted. Symbol software can then barely provide meaningful symbol equivalents to the text. The end result is often no more - and often much LESS - understandable than the original. To be able to translate the FE consultation text into symbols, we first had to shorten the original and translate it into simpler language. Alongside this, the person operating the symbol software had to have specialist knowledge of a) language and b) symbol systems, so that appropriate symbol synonyms were selected from the range on offer within the software, or, if necessary, other graphics imported from different symbol systems or sources such as clip art
Appendix 4 compares the results of text converted into symbols for i) full text translation, and ii) synopsis of text converted into symbol form. Full translation is comprehensive but cumbersome and makes it difficult to follow the meaning of the document. A synopsis of the full consultation as it affected young people was therefore produced in symbol form.
Other considerations
For the consultation to be effective, a number of practical concerns also needed to be addressed, including Identifying where the people to be consulted are located, who supports them, what groups they meet in, and whether it will be acceptable for outsiders to involve them.
Meeting all these requirements takes time. With low incidence disabilities the only option is to travel to the people as, for the most part, the logistics of transport just don't allow central venue meetings for focus groups.
What we asked
While keeping to the main thrust of the consultation questions aimed at young people, their families and carers it was necessary to convert the questions into a more accessible form. The questions needed to be re-worded and presented in different ways so that they would be more meaningful to: those who were planning to attend or are attending; those who want or wanted to attend but cannot or could not get a place. A sample of the revised questions, in text form, is shown in Appendix 5
Letter of introduction and explanation
Appendix 6 reproduces the letters sent out to parents, staff and young people as appropriate, explaining the aims of the consultation and how the consultation would take place.
Permission letter
In all instances permission was first sought from the young people that they were willing to participate in the exercise. User friendly versions were produced in advance. Not only was the permission form designed to be user-friendly to look at but allowed young people to give permission, or not, to any one or more aspect of the consultation. That is:
- to take part
- to have their names used in the report
- to have their views attributed
- to express their views on camera or, separately, on video
Depending on their particular preference young people, could sign, nod to video camera, tick, give thumbs up or whatever. See Appendix 7.
Background to FE consultation in simplified form
Following on from the comparison set out in Appendix 4, Appendix 8 shows the simplified form of the consultation used with many of the young people/.
Background and questions converted to MS PowerPoint
Appendix 9 is a short paragraph outlining what was done to convert the symbolised versions of the background paper and questions into MS PowerPoint for use in group or class discussions.
Sample college courses
Appendix 10 provides sample course Prospectuses for various colleges (Inverness College; Lord Mayor Treloar, Hampshire, Beaumont, Royal National College, Hereford). Their inclusion is not intended to portray any preference on the part of the authors.
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