Page updated 21.05.08
About The Right Track
People with a learning disability supporting People with a learning disability.
People with a learning disability run the Right Track. We are supported by two support workers and by social work students who work with us as part of their training. We work across Bedfordshire and Luton.
We also have an exciting Direct Payments project
Our aim is to ‘signpost’ people with a learning disability to organisations that give advice or support with things like:
- Housing
- Employment
- Transport
- Health
- Leisure
- Money
Right Track cannot give advice about what to do but will try to put people in touch with organisations that can.
Click here to find a list of drop in sessions and meetings
We also offer people with a learning disability the chance of volunteering with the Right Track, meeting new people and learning new skills.
Click here for a presentation about the Right Track
Right Track Aims
We aim to give information and support to:
- People who don’t get support from learning disability services
- People whose services are changing and who want information about what their choices are
- Volunteers who gain confidence, skills and experience
- Organisations that can give information or advice to people with a learning disability
- Social work students who learn from working in the project
How we started
The idea for the Right Track came from people with a learning disability. We wanted to help other people with a learning disability who need information and advice but don’t get support from learning disability services. We thought we could do this by putting them in touch with the type of organisations in the community that everyone else uses.
Our idea was to 'map' local areas and find out where people could get support or advice. We would then pass this information on to other people with a learning disability through drop-in sessions and a website.
We met a group called Nyabingi in Luton who have support from social work students and are paid for helping to train them. We decided we could also offer students the chance to learn by supporting us. The Learning and Skills Network were looking at ways for people who use services to help train social workers. They gave us money to pay a worker to support us for 5 hours a week for a year and help us set up the project. We launched the Right Track in May 2006
Launch May 2006
We set up a Steering Group to manage the project and plan how to get things started. We held a launch event in Dunstable and invited organisations to set up displays to tell people about their services. People with a learning disability and carers came and found out lots of useful information.
Our first year
Our Steering Group spent most of the first year looking at how to make sure we have the skills, confidence and support to manage the project properly. We have been supported by Spark Bedfordshire Adult Community Learning and by some expert volunteers. We pay Advocacy Alliance for office space and support with our banking and money.
Our second year
In 2007 we were funded to employ a Direct Payments Support Worker. We wrote the job description and advert and designed a pack so we understood how to recruit and interview staff. We can offer training to other organisations and people with a learning disability to help them involve people in choosing staff. If you would like to know more about this training or our recruitment pack, please Contact Us
Social Work Students
Supporting social work students from the University of Bedfordshire is a really important part of Right Track’s work. So far we have only had one student at a time. They come for a few months and we are involved at every stage:
- Interviewing students
- Induction and training
- Planning the work they will do to support us and get lots of experience
- Supervising students - one member has done the Practice Assessor Training
- Meetings University lecturers to talk about how students are doing
- Giving feedback on students
This learning is a two-way thing. Students learn from us but we also learn a lot from them.
It is always sad when they leave - but most of them never really go away and some still support us as volunteers!
Keeping the Right Track on Track
We work under the Advocacy Alliance charity status and pay them for office, finance and other support and for helping us supervise social work students. We would like to be more independent and the work we are doing now is helping us to understand how to run a project and to decide the support and information we need to do this well.
A Steering Group manages the project, with representatives from Bedford, Luton, Mid-Bedfordshire and South Bedfordshire. The Steering Group works to our ‘operational plan’ - this is based on the planning Path for the project.
The Steering Group makes decisions, based on information and suggestions from the policy or finance sub-group and from expert volunteers.
We call this ‘informed decision making’ and it means we are given accurate and clear information about different options and supported to make decisions at every level of the project.
The Right Track 'Path'
It was really important that we had a plan that made sense to us and we could use check the work we do. It is very easy to get caught up in other things and find you have not done the things you set out to do. Our plan is there to remind us what we should be doing. Like any other person centred plan, it changes as we learn and do more things – but our dreams for the project stay the same.
Jonathan Ralphs, the Person Centred Planning Co-ordinator for Bedfordshire helped us with the plan.Click here to find out more about Person Centred Planning
