Gary is one of the Membership and Engagement Leads at Learning Disability England

I had great pleasure recording a podcast with Campaign 4 Change, supported by Achieve Together recently. The podcast is called Wheel of Engagement and this episode will be out to listen to by the end of October so keep an eye out for it!

We had such a productive chat about the Good Lives Framework hosted by Learning Disability England. We concentrated on three of the areas that the framework includes, which were social care, employment and transport. It was a thought-provoking afternoon.

We also talked about other matters, such as having more trustees with lived experience to represent our members. We wondered how charities could lead the way in employing more people with learning disabilities and autistic people. We also discussed how we could include more people with profound and complex needs, as well as looking at how minority ethnic groups and diversity groups’ challenges could be added to the Good Lives framework.

Transport has been raised as a big issue for many of our members. In general, in most areas of the country you can only use your bus pass between 9.30am and 11pm. This means that our members can have problems in getting to things on time. These and other challenges, are why our members agreed that one of our next chapters is to be a Transport chapter.

The way that Social Care is seen and organised presents many barriers to getting the help that some members need. Social Care is seen as only working with the elderly, but it is so much more. Another challenge in this area is that staff need to be paid higher wages and we need more staff in general, we talked about how we could source people from abroad to work in social care. Funding is another big challenge, where the Social Care sector, much like the NHS, needs to be funded over 10 years, so that it has good planning and continuity of care.

Education is another hot topic. Instead of people being sent straight to a day centre when they finish school, we talked about how it would be much better for them and the community to learn more useful skills, getting new qualifications and being a productive member of the community. This goes hand in hand with employment, so we agreed that education, at some stage in the future, should be another chapter.

We talked about benefits, and how they should be a top up on wages if people need that on top of part time work.

Thinking about the future, we all agreed that it would be great to include leisure, hobbies and holidays as another chapter. For example, we like the idea of the use of gig buddies to go to concerts and events, staying up late and meaning that our members do not always have to be in bed early due to lack of support.

Another critical issue in facilitating understanding and respect is that of the way things are said – so reminding members of the public to “mind your language”. We want to eradicate the use of old words that can be offensive or disrespectful and, above all, hurtful. Some organisations still use these words or use abbreviations of words that can be provocative and controversial.

The Wheel of Engagement podcast discussing all these issues and more will hopefully be released by the end of October. I would like to say a big thank you to all those who took part.