Cheshire East Aiming High for Disabled Children

Workforce Development

Reflect and Change was commissioned by Cheshire East Aiming High for Disabled Children Short Breaks Transformation Programme in March 2010. The commission was to develop proposals to build a skilled, knowledgeable and confident workforce across universal, targeted and specialist provision to provide inclusive, safe and positive opportunities and activities for disabled children and young people. The work included;

• Collating information on skills, knowledge, gaps in skills and knowledge, preferred methods of learning from key contacts across the Children’s Trust including health settings, schools, universal services, residential services, carers, children’s centres, sport, leisure and voluntary providers
• Meeting with parents and carers of disabled children to explore their views on the training needs of the Children’s Trust workforce, parents/carers and other family members
• The development of a rolling programme of learning
• Work with health colleagues to establish ways to provide training around specific health needs of individual children and young people with complex health needs

Recommendations included that East Cheshire adopts working practices that are supportive of the needs of disabled children and their families, and of the learning and development needs of the workforce around individual children with complex needs.

A workforce learning model has been developed with ‘hubs’ for each of the following areas and three levels of learning:

• Complex health needs
• Inclusion and Social Model of Disability
• Therapeutic interventions, communication and childcare
• Autistic Spectrum Disorder/Managing challenging behaviour

Further recommendations included:

• Proposals to be presented to the Children and Young People’s Leadership team, the CECPCT and the Children’s Trust Board for consideration, review and agreement
• The development and implementation of a strategy for inclusion across the Children’s
• Monitoring and evaluation of the model
• Child specific training needs are identified through the overall assessment and planning processes linked to working practices
• Champions to be developed for parental involvement and workforce development
• Learning and development needs are met through training, e-learning and Action Learning Sets
• The model supports the learning needs of the wider children’s workforce, including East Cheshire Council, CECPCT, schools, settings, third sector providers, short break carers, parents and family members