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Exeter Council for Voluntary Services

Exeter Council for Voluntary Services manages a self-advocacy project for adults with learning difficulties and the project worker has one of the laptops.

An early piece of work was a collaboration between a service-user and the project worker. This was a PowerPoint presentation about summer trips service users had been on, and it was shown at the local Mencap Society Annual General Meeting. The trips are run as part of the Exeter Community Partnership. The trips are run as part of the Exeter Community Education programme for people with learning difficulties.

The presentation included symbols, pictures and photo’s of places visited and finished with a slide of the Millennium, developed by the Devon Total Communication Partnership. The presentation ran continuously on the laptop And many people viewed it with great interest.

Since then we have started to make the laptop widely available to groups of people with learning difficulties in Exeter, and this is very much the direction we wish the project to go in.

For example, the self-advocacy project worker visits the several residential homes for people with learning difficulties. This work is about developing ways in which residents are involved in decision making processes within their homes.

The project worker has written to the homes about the laptop, offering it for use by and with residents. The letter included several examples of what could be done using symbols, pictures, photo’s and so on. This includes timetables, activity cards, menus, home brochures, literacy and numeracy skills, PowerPoint presentations, staff rota’s and so on.

As part of this we have listed with local speech and language therapists to ensure consistency of approach to our work in homes, and symbols software has been installed on the laptop in accordance with licensing agreements. We are also exploring funding for a digital camera.

In addition, the laptop is being offered to other groups with learning difficulties in Exeter. It has already been booked for sessions each week by a local Community Resource centre, the local Mencap Social Centre and Exeter College. The latter are currently setting up a self- advocacy group for their students with learning difficulties, and they plan to use the laptop and their own digital camera to produce minutes, newsletters, gather information as so on.

To end, we feel privileged to have one of the laptops within our self-advocacy project. We are just beginning to appreciate it’s potential for facilitating and enabling people with learning difficulties to express their views and to have more control over their lives.

We are very grateful to the DfES and NIACE.

Peter Vance.

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