Transition issues at school

Decisions about which subject or courses to take at secondary are made in Year 9 for people aged 13 or 14. These choices will depend upon the child’s abilities, interests and long-term aspirations. They form part of the educational transition process to help prepare young people for adult independence. Guidelines of how to help the education provider and young person with long-term illness or disability plan ahead are set out in the SEN Code of Practice issued by the government in 2002. (See section: Specialist legal, benefits and education, advice, organisations page 116).

Check out and download copies of documents from www.teachernet.gov.uk/wholeschool/sen or phone: 0845 602 2260

The new guidelines emphase that successful communication and transition planning involve a threeway process between parents, the young person and the school. Young people may need support to fully express their views and perspectives, and some parents need gentle help to share responsibility with young people. This is a new element in the guidelines and will be interpreted differently in different schools.

Details about this process are provided by the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education or the Department for Education and Skills ( see final chapter for addresses and other sources of information and advice).

Local education authorities have a duty to provide education for children until the age of 16. They have to attend until the last Friday in June after the sixteenth birthday). Education beyond this age is the responsibility of the Learning and Skills Council, which brings together further education, vocation and other adult education options. Young people are entitled to full time education until they reach 19.

Young people communicating their own health needs

For most young people, the gradual road to independence includes learning to look after their own health needs. It is important that young people where possible, develop their own skills, relationships and confidence when speaking to service providers.

Young people with arthritis have to learn to communicate their heath needs, but this is not always a straightforward process:-

“I have found that even the most informed doctor or health person cannot provide the most basic of information, if you don’t phrase the question in the right way. It’s frustrating because often you don’t know the right question to ask. When I had to deal with the last problem which didn’t seem to have a solution, I asked the doctor what the possibilities were, and this got a much better response”.

and

“A lot of research is hit and miss. It’s hard finding the right person to ask. We often just have to do the research ourselves, by asking other parents, looking up the internet, contacting disability groups and reading medical papers in the library”.

Transition in health services

The health care in this chapter mainly refers to care received within the hospital, either as an in-patient on the ward or as an outpatient in a clinic. There are other services in the community. Sometimes there appear to be overlaps and gaps in care delivered in different communities, and each health authority operates differently. There may be periods when the young person is attending children services for some things, and adult services for others.

For some families it is a shock to find that the specialist paediatric services that they had relied on in the past are no longer available to them. Some parents and young people may find these changes shocking and stressful. Being fore-warned about the transition arrangements of the services your child attends will help you prepare yourself and the young person to adapt to the new situation. For example a young person with a joint problem may have been seen on the same children’s ward throughout her childhood, but once sixteen the young person with the same problem has to go onto a general hospital ward. The majority of other people on such wards may be elderly. Some families continue to find that once the young person is too old to attend services for children, some therapies and important services are more difficult to replace.

“We have found that some of the health services we were used to getting for our children were not so readily available for them as adults such as physiotherapy and speech and language therapy services. Some services stopped once they left school. They can also lose the very specialist healthcare services they were used to getting when they were using paediatric services.”

Healthy lifestyles

As is the case with probably most teenagers, all parents often have experienced problems trying to encourage young people to lead healthy lifestyles and take more responsibility for their well-being. Attention to what they eat and drink, how much physical exercise they choose, what drugs they do or don’t take and how they manage their anxieties and emotional lives may have caused concern at different times. It can be hard sometimes to encourage them to take responsibility for creating a good lifestyle for themselves, particularly when it can seem as though there are few options or choices.