Making '14 plus' reviews person-centred

Living WELL, Dec 2004 by Sanderson, Helen, Jones, Sue, Mathieson, Ruth, Ali, Annette, Hibbs, Wendy

This article describes a person-centred process that could be used in age 14 reviews in schools. We used this process with two young people, CoMn and Julie, who both attend Canton School in Hull. With the permission of the people involved, this paper describes what we did, the results, and what the people who participated thought of the meeting. We end with some ideas about how people could use and develop this process.

The meetings were organised by Sue, Ruth and Annette, who also attended the meetings so that we could reflect together on what worked and did not work. Helen Sanderson facilitated the meetings. This project developed as a result of the 'Making Research Count' course at York University1.

Purpose

At Canton school reviews usually take an hour and a half and are attended by the teacher, family and any professionals involved with the family whether or not they have met the young person. What usually happens is fairly formal and involves going through the LEA transition paperwork in a methodical manner. This is a bland process and because parents are unprepared they are unable to contribute fully and are often distressed by the process. The young person makes no contribution.

We wanted to see how we could change these meetings without taking more time, requiring additional preparation or involving many more people. If we could achieve that, we thought that this would make it more likely that schools could adopt a different way of conducting reviews. We used the headings and adapted a process from a style of personcentred planning called Essential Lifestyle Planning (Smull & Sanderson, 2001).

The basic aims of a person-centred review meeting are to:

1. Review the information that everyone has about what they like and admire about the person; what is important to the person (now and for the future); and what help and support the person needs.

2. Identify what else we need to learn to develop this information into a person-centred transition plan and agree actions for this.

3. Identify what is working and not working from different perspectives (the young person, the school, the family, and other people).

4. Agree actions that will continue what is working and change what is not working.

Process

The following describes the overall process we used for each meeting

We put a lot of flip chart paper on the walls of the schoolroom. On the flip chart we put the following headings for the meeting:

* What we like and admire about the person

* What is important to the person now

* What is important to the person for the future

* What support and help the person needs

* Questions to answer/issues we are struggling with

* What is working and not working (we used four sheets for this, what is working and not working from the person's perspective, the school's perspective, the family's perspective and from other people's perspective)

* Actions.

The meeting was in two parts, each taking about 45 minutes. The first part was to gather information, and the second part was to review this information and agree actions.

At the beginning of the meeting Helen asked everyone to introduce themselves by explaining who they were in the person's life, and by telling everyone something that they liked and admired about the person. Helen wrote this on one of the flip charts under the 'like and admire' heading.

Helen explained the process, describing with examples what each of the headings meant. Ground rules for the meeting were agreed, including how to support the person during the meeting. We then started to write on the flip charts. Both individuals were supported to contribute and Annette and Ruth recorded their views.

The second part of the meeting was to review the information and agree actions. Helen began by reading the 'working and not working' sheets. We looked at what was working, acknowledged how much was working well in the person's life and identified actions that ensured that what was working well would continue. Then we focussed on what was not working, and what we could do together to address this, and added these actions to the list.

We then looked at the list of 'questions to answer/issues we are struggling with', talked about what we could do to address these and added them to the action list.

Finally, we reviewed what we had written earlier under the other headings (what people like and admire about the person, what was important to them, and what help and support they needed) and decided how this information would be recorded and how more information could be added. Helen shared some person-centred approaches that could be used to gather this information, for example, learning logs and communication sections.

The meeting ended with each person sharing what they had appreciated about their time together with the individual concerned, and helping to evaluate this way of having reviews by recording what they liked or did not like about the process.

Colin's meeting

Colin's Mum Lisa, his Connexions personal advisor Wendy, Pat the head teacher, and his class teacher Sue came with Colin to his meeting. Colin chose music to play at his meeting and this was on as he arrived. He chose spiritual music - 'He's Got the Whole World in his Hands'. This felt appropriate for a meeting where we were trying to put Colin firmly in the centre. He also brought pictures of something that he liked about school, and something that he didn't. He had also done a picture and collage of what he wanted for his future, which focussed on trains.