Shropshire PACC have been extending their work with Adult Social Care over the past 18 months, with a particular focus on improving transition experience and outcomes.  The years where a young person prepares for and moves from Children Services to Adult Services is a period known as ‘Preparation For Adulthood (PFA)’.  There has been a national focus on PFA for some time, and there are 4 key outcomes linked to this work, these are summarised below:

Employment or volunteering
Independent living i.e. moving out of the family home
Good health
Friendship and social opportunities

This is a huge area of work and covers many different topics.  In Shropshire there is a PFA Strategy Group with a number of task and finish groups.  The main strategy group has responsibility for ensuring that services work towards the outcomes agreed in the Shropshire SEND strategy.  The current task and finish groups are:

Employment & Volunteering
Accommodation
Information
Community & Leisure

PACC provides parent carers’ representation on all these groups.

Last year PACC started looking at the journey towards independent living and employment.  They held a workshop in February 2020 and published a report ‘A Sense of Purpose and a Home of My Own’ but this work was unfortunately disrupted by Covid.  More recently PACC have started looking at this area again, exploring families experience of the move to Supported Living.  On the 25th November 2021, PACC hosted a Supported Living Workshop at Shrewsbury Football Ground. This was delivered jointly with the Shropshire Adult Social Team and aimed to respond to the findings of the ‘A Sense of Purpose and Home of my Own Report’, so that parent carers are more confident about what supported living is, the process and how to ensure that young people in supported living lead good lives.

The workshop provided an introduction to Supported Living, as well as providing information on the delivery of Supported Living in Shropshire. Also considered was what the lives of young people in Supported Living might look like and how young people can be enabled to develop active and rewarding lives as they move into adulthood.

The workshop was well attended with just under 50 people present, the majority of whom were parent carers.  The event was live streamed and recorded so that those who could not attend could still access the information provided.  The presentations and recording can be accessed by clicking here.