ENABLIN+

Our work brings the voice of people with intellectual disabilities and their families where decisions about their future are made. This has always been incredibly important. It is even more so with the Covid pandemic drastic impact on their rights and lives. Being visible and vocal on issues directly affecting millions of people requires your...

ENABLIN+

Introduction

The project ENABLIN+ is addressed at the needs of children and youth with complex and intense support needs (CISN), and the people who support them. It wants to develop a system of interdisciplinary in-service training, where professionals and parents of various professional backgrounds learn together, with the aim of enhancing quality of life of the children. This project has eight partners, see list of partners here.

This project responds to urgent needs for training, signalled in richer as well poorer EU member states, to meet the increasing demands for supporting children with CISN and comply to the 2006 Convention of the United Nations on the rights of persons with disabilities, forcing countries to take measures of de-institutionalisation and to organize the possibility of including children with a disability in normal schools & life.

To that purpose, the project wants to:

  • Do a needs study
  • Do a search and describe examples of good practice
  • Develop a set of training modules in EN, NL, FR, IT, RO, HU and BG languages, oriented at support needs assessment, staff attitudes, beliefs and conceptual systems, enhancing children’s communication capacities, daily life activities, behaviour regulation, activation and participation in learning and inclusive schooling
  • Create modules can be on-line as well as in real meetings
  • Do an international summer school will be organized
  • Provide results that will be disseminated in newsletters, professional articles, a white-book and DVD

Project Design

To realize this goal of inclusion and activation, there is a need of trans-disciplinary collaboration of all parties concerned: parents, teachers, daily-life supporting staff, medical & rehabilitation staff and vocational training staff.

Solutions which have proven their efficacy – inventions made by professionals or parents – remain often very local, because of language and organizational barriers. Local organizations could therefore benefit from an exchange at a European level. To achieve this goal, parents-professionals cooperation must be strengthened, and in-service training models should be developed which are of benefit to institutional supporting staff, regular school staff and parents, in approaches of intellectual activation and inclusion.Hence the name “ENABLIN +”, which has two aspects (enabling = the opposite of disability; it means: to allow the person to function).

The organisers of this project preferred to broaden the target group, more in terms of their needs of intense support, which has not so much to do with the medical situation, but more with the impairments. It is thus oriented at children with multiple disabilities, who have a combination of marked limitations, which put at serious risk their development leading them to experience severe difficulties in the learning process and participation in the various contexts in which they live: education, family and community.

This project identified a number of the greatest difficulties that children with disabilities face concerning activity and participation. Some examples are: understanding of the surrounding world (difficulty in accessing information), decisions taking about their life and the processes of interaction with the environment (with people and objects among others.

In order to diminish the barriers the barriers to their participations and learning, this project recommends providing intensive support in daily activities and in learning, involve with partners who accept them as active participants, have identical experiences in different environments, be in common environments where significant opportunities exist to participate in multiple diversified experiments and to interact with people and significant objects.

Consequently, these students need specific services support, in their natural settings, whenever it is possible, in order to respond to their specific needs. These supports must be embodied in their individual educational programmes.

Lastly, the direct target group for this project is mainstream and special education staff, personal assistants for daily living, support staff, parents, medical and rehabilitation staff, representative organisations for the disabled, vocational training staff at secondary and continuous professional development level.

The objectives of this project are:

  1. To promote quality of life of children and young adults with complex dependency needs by increasing social and educational participation, facilitating activities, learning and development; by raising awareness of those supporting them, that it is possible and worthwhile to activate them, and by creating a shift of mind in this sense;
  2. To enhance the quality of support as well as contribute to de-institutionalisation and inclusion, by increasing self-efficacy of parents and professionals working with children and young adults with complex dependency needs, in accompanying them towards a more inclusive and active life;
  3. To develop interdisciplinary in-service training modules for professionals and parents working with this target group, to enhance competencies in cognitive activation, increasing autonomy, activities in daily life, communication, behaviour regulation and in inclusive education;
  4. Professionalizing staff of mainstream schools in welcoming children with complex dependency needs;
  5. Strengthen parents-professionals cooperation;
  6. Empower parents and professionals

Furthermore, this project has introduced some innovative aspects such as: a trans-disiciplinary character and multi-level learning, training parents and professionals together and the definition of the target groups as “complex and intensive needs and dependency” among others.

For more information about this project, please click here.

Outcomes

In order to see the results of this project, please click here.

For more information about the project, please click here.

Our work brings the voice of people with intellectual disabilities and their families where decisions about their future are made.

This has always been incredibly important. It is even more so with the Covid pandemic drastic impact on their rights and lives.

Being visible and vocal on issues directly affecting millions of people requires your support. 

Become Inclusion Europe supporter and help us keep doing our work.

 

 

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