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Annual review- Disabled children without a voice

One of the biggest issues for the 13,000 disabled children who are placed in hospitals, special needs schools and residential homes – often miles from their families – is that they have serious problems communicating. Therefore, this year more than ever we have been striving to improve our effectiveness in helping such children to ensure that they all, including those who communicate without speech, have someone to understand them, speak up on their behalf and ensure they are heard. To this end, last October we launched our Stand by Me campaign to give disabled children placed away from home the a right to an independent advocate – someone to understand them, know their rights and help them take part in decisions affecting their lives.

Highlights 2006/07

• Our Lancashire Children’s Rights project has always had good results in providing advocacy for disabled children, but to meet the needs of more children we have started to focus on sharing our expertise with Health and Children’s Services teams throughout the county. This has particularly enabled children who communicate without speech to make their views known.
• Last November, Solihull Shared Care’s launched Askability, the world’s first website for disabled children with communication difficulties and has been reaping rewards ever since. By using symbols familiar to children with communication difficulties, it gives them easy access to national and local news, sport and entertainment. It attracted some 10,000 visitors globally in its first six weeks.
• Our Disability Advocacy project used the funding it received from the Department of Education and Skills to carry out All Decisions – a survey of local authority disabled children’s teams across 33 London boroughs. The survey revealed that many professionals struggle to involve young people in decisions affecting their lives. Our findings will be used to inform future training programmes for professionals working with disabled children to help ensure they are heard.

Find out more about our research.