"It's about acceptance into the community. When I first came into the care sector probably 15 years ago, there was a massive lack of understanding around disabilities. It has improved, but I still feel that unless you have someone in your family or someone on your street, with a disability, then there’s a lot of ignorance against it. They're different, so I'm not going to engage."
For anyone that doesn't know what Skillshop is, what kind of service is it?
“When I started Skillshop three years ago, nobody knew us, no social workers knew us, and everyone that I spoke with didn't know who we were, so my goal was to get our name out there.
But obviously then COVID hit, inclusion stopped. Since the restrictions eased, we've been back on track with creating new contacts again and making the service robust. We're back in touch with schools to try and get them back on board with the understanding of disabilities. As you know, my bugbear with school kids at the minute is none of them have an understanding of disabilities. So, if our clients are walking in the park or going home, or out in town, they are vilified, they're bullied, and they receive negative attention.
Skillshop is a charity. It's a day centre for adults with high needs. Skillshop was set up back in 2005 by Cath Parrot and Patricia McLean. Cath has a disabled son, and he was leaving school, and he went to look around at what was available in Calderdale. Back then there was nothing. In 2005 day services like this didn't exist. Direct payments was only just being introduced, and it was either you go to work, or you stay at home, there was no in between. No life skills, no engagement, nothing. Cath basically took an investment loan with a vision of buying the premises that we're in now. So, the vision is to create a Skillshop village with accommodation, an on-site swimming pool and a fully functioning garden.
One of the difficulties when I started was trying to get staff on board with the vision, which is to promote life skills and to push our clients out of their comfort zones so they can really learn new skills. Two years ago I got in touch with the Soil Association, because I knew where we wanted to go with it, but I couldn't see how to get from where we were with the state of the gardening and how to move it all forward.”
I think it is nice just to touch on the conversation we had about engaging people with higher needs and learning difficulties in activities that grew different capabilities instead of focussed work placement, where people we're almost working for nothing.
I know you said it was basically slave labor. I always loved being at Skillshop garden sessions because there is so much scope for learning - social, nature connection, coordination, creativity, and the life skill of growing and eating well. I have to say your garden is one of the smallest, most productive and focussed educational gardens I have come across in Halifax. It's so pleasing to know it's there.
“Work placements were mind draining, monotonous... Currently when our clients join every year, they write their own goals, and we do regular updates. They will have a three-month goal, a six month, or 12-month goal. Some have a five-year goal, depending on what the goal is. For example, we have a client that comes four days a week, and her goal this year is to tie her own shoelaces. She's been wearing slip-on shoes for the last 40 odd years. Now, to some people, to some employees and to some hierarchy and council, that's not a goal. A goal is getting somebody from unemployed to employment, but this doesn't often encompass the adults we work with.
So, my argument with the Director of Social Services who promotes employment and tries to get all our clients into employment, is this. If one of our clients’ needs to go to work for six months, at Morrison's for example, to stock shelves or trolleys or even on the tills, they'll need support. After those six months, is there a guarantee that that person will be offered ongoing work with no support. And there isn't. There's no guarantee. Speaking to Mr. Morrison, (Ken Morrison), he gets exactly where I'm coming from because there is a job that needs filling that adult, even with six months’ worth of work experience, will have to compete with another 10 candidates from the Job Centre, and he's still going to choose who he feels is the best asset for Morrison's not what is the best for social services. So, it's a catch 22. So we enable our clients to pick their goals, whether it be, I want to learn to play drums, I want to tie my shoelaces, I want to learn to open a tin of beans, or I want to iron my own clothes. The world's their oyster basically. You can come, and you can choose what you want to do, and we'll try to get it so that you can achieve that goal.”
And at the same time trying to push them outside their comfort zone like you said, not too easy for them to tackle; it's something that makes them think a little bit differently, and challenges their self worth, and all the things that are part of creating a fuller human being.
“One of the key comments that has come to service was from about a month ago, we tried to promote more life skills. Because the sun was shining, we went out and painted some benches, and tidied up the garden. The photos went out on Facebook, and off the back of that, we got a letter saying how fantastic it was that we'd managed to get the client to do that because, at home, they struggle to get them to do anything. Although it's not what the council envisage of getting everyone into employment, it is about creating achievements and creating the life that they're entitled to.”
I want to know what your interpretation of inclusion and diversity is and what it means to you. I think we've kind of touched on that already - that people are entitled to live where they set their own goals and achieve those goals; an entitlement to full life; but it would be good to just talk about the requirements and needs of your client group. So, thinking about complex needs, what are they and what does that mean in terms of inclusion and diversity.
“I think a lot of people have a different take on inclusion and diversity. So, a prime example at Skillshop is that we believe, if I can do it, our clients can do it. But not everyone has that same mentality. So we've had hiccups and we've had roadblocks, particularly where staff have created complaints. We've even been reported to the council recently, with a complaint that we were doing things that we shouldn't be doing. When we've been investigated, we've actually been shown to be doing better than what you should be doing, because we're enabling them, we're including them in decision making, their setting the tasks and we're not just saying, "right, we're doing this today and all nine of you are doing it too". We're giving them the option, we've giving them the tools, the resources, and we're really thinking about them.”
So, a fundamental thing to you is the ability for clients to co-deign their life choices in what they do, which is interesting because the fact that you provide so many different opportunities and they rotate around all those different things, it could be said that you are inclusive and diverse with this approach. Yet, by taking that one step further and saying, 'you can choose exactly what you do within all those different opportunities, you can design different aspects of those skills you develop (there isn't one route to success) you are providing a highly individualised and inclusive service.
“What we've done in the last three weeks, we've profiled our clients so we can see who is high needs, medium needs, and free roam. Now, the free roamers are the ones that want to. They put their hands up for everything and anything. The staff view, for quite a while, has been that it won't be done right or we can't do that because they won't be supervised effectively, but what we've done instead is provide the support, with social services, to the right clients. We've now got roughly a 50-50 split, but we've got two sessions running, but we've also got four or five clients that can come in and make much more defined choices. They might not want to do some of the activities, or direct what they do within them, so they ask to do jobs.
For example, we've got a client called Paul. He used to work for gardening services, so he's been working outside here. He comes and gets his job list, and if there's not three or four jobs on there he'll come back and ask for more to be put on. That's what he wants to do, so because of that we have introduced a payment scheme. So even though the council pays for him to come, we now give him lunch and coffees, free of charge. To him he's getting paid through saving that money, and he gets that sense of achievement.”
And also, we need to have some level of risk. They need some risk because that reflects life and if they don't experience it, they can't go out into the big wide world.
I think it's interesting, when I work with schools on projects around gardening, I take an un-learning approach. Kids will come in with their teachers, and the teachers will be very specific about lining up, or in the way they engage, but I want them to engage with the environment in a way that is natural. I want them to climb and fall and be themselves so they can learn the reaches of their own capabilities, have confidence, make informed choices for themselves and their peers. I want children and adults, and the elderly people I work with to assess their own risk. And you know one of my own bugbears with working with elderly people is I want them outside in all different weather, obviously within reason, but not wrapped up in cotton wool like you said. When I've worked with stroke patients, I want them to go outside and feel cold air on their body, assimilate to different temperatures, activate their nervous system, engage them with choice. It's crazy what we take away from people in trying to help them.
“It's where a level of care stops being given, and then there is deterioration because the independence isn't there. I mean, my partner used to work in an old people's home and I couldn't get my head round, how some people could move in and be totally independent and then within two or three weeks, be ill, and that's because they're not having the engagement, they're not stimulated.”
They are not making decisions and not using one's brain. That's the thing you've got in good balance here. I think where you allow people to make their own decisions, allow them that space to discuss that, get support where it is required and make sure that they're getting their needs met properly in that process of decision making, that's where people are generally thriving.
“It comes down to best interests. If someone came and asked if so and so could do that, we know each of our clients so well, I could tell you exactly if they could, how they could, or how much support they would need. And I think that's what makes us who we are. We know what makes our clients tick.”
Again, we've touched on a little bit of this, what are the key problems we face in relation to meeting people's differences, and including marginalized people in Calderdale, so if we're talking about your client group, we've talked a little bit about bullying and even about work placement.
“Yes, it's about acceptance into the community. Although it's not what it was 20 years ago it's still tough. When I first came into the care sector probably 15 years, maybe 16 years, there was a massive lack of understanding around disabilities. It has improved, but I still feel that unless you have someone in your family or someone on your street, with a disability, then there’s a lot of ignorance against it. They're different, so I'm not going to engage. I've been in this situation.
So, if we were to go down to the park to play football, we've had dog walkers where they don't understand, and they've asked our clients what they are staring at and approach them in a manner that they wouldn't have done if it was a normal person. Once you spend a couple of minutes explaining they understand. When I introduced the lanyard thing with our guys it was a breakthrough. People can see that someone has a hidden disability. So, I did a lot of work with our guys trying to get them to wear them so people could engage with them effectively. Unfortunately, I feel that that has now had a negative effect because there's too many people using the lanyards.
We have a client that does independent shopping, and we'll get a phone call to say that is stuck in Tesco, and he doesn't want to go outside because there are teenage boys and girls outside being nasty to him. That's because he'll stand there and stare, he understands he wants to make friends, but he doesn't understand the concept of age. He wants to be friendly with them, but they don't understand who he is, so they're being nasty and then that can create safeguarding issues and could be a massive, massive thing. So it's now about looking for a different way of dealing with it. That's why I've gone to the school and said 'can I come in and do an assembly?' and I'll take a few of our guys in and show people how difficult it often is to tell who has a disability, with the opportunity to explain.”
I think that's the thing isn’t it. Even with more inclusion in school, we either kind of integrate people with things like dyslexia or autism in a way where it's not actually that often talked about. So, there's integration without discussion, which works on some level, because it's actually quite inclusive. But, at the same time, we end up with a lack of awareness and knowledge, and then when you come across something different it's a challenge. We really need to build up people's tolerance by exposing people to different things and we don't do that enough, not in schools and not in communities.
“I mean if you said to somebody, 'do you know what autism, or do you know what a disability is?' They will often go back to the last person with a disability and that's not always reflective of what's going on. Despite people's disability, even if people can't speak, we still engage with them like everyone else. We're just starting wood work again. My theory is that it might take David a week to make a bird box and it might take Susie 12 weeks to make a bird box, but it's not about the time. It's how we build their goals, the journey whilst also working as a group. Together they help each other out. They aspire together.”
Which is pretty much what we should be doing in communities anyway. We should be bringing people with us, and we don't know how to.
So how has this changed or expanded since the recent COVID-19 crisis, so we're obviously that bit further on than when we started doing the interviews and second wave lockdown and now, we're kind of back to pretty much a similar reality, you guys have done a lot in that time haven’t you?
“Well let's talk about the award. We won Charity of the Year. So in March 2020, Boris Johnson came on the news and said you've got to overwhelm and COVID hit. So, when the news came out that services were going to close and we were going to have to think outside the box. The council basically rang us and said 'close, we will continue to pay if you come up with a plan to deliver your sessions throughout COVID’. So at the start of COVID, we had quite a lot of resistance from staff. Everyone was under government guidelines, and wanted to stay home if they could, and it was quite a big challenge to try and get a lot of the staff members to come into service.
Now my theory was, we offer care, we offer support and we can't do that from home. And if the council is going to pay us we need to be offering that service. So we started offering online sessions and I started with a fitness session at nine o'clock every morning. It would go live on our Facebook page. We did online quizzes, the we dropped lunches off to people, we dropped plant pots, and compost and seedlings off, and we had a sunflower growing competition, and the council basically said you're doing okay. As soon as restrictions started to lift, we went and visited our clients and took them out in a safe way. The Council were happy for services to make a call every day, but It wasn't just about that. My job was hard over the last 12 months to try and embed the charitable element into staff and to appreciate what we're doing more. Could we notch it up and go above and beyond? We set up a link with Tesco, who donated food. We also then created food parcels and dropped the food parcels with clients. We also created food parcels for Focus for Hope, a homeless charity, and created that link between us and them, because they were affected massively with COVID. So yeah, basically July, I got an email to say that we've been nominated for Charity of the Year. We were up against three other charities in Calderdale and I wasn't expecting it. I'll tell you here, the charities that were awarded did an amazing job. I did the Zoom call with them and at the end of the call they announced Skillshop was the winner. It felt like it was amazing.”
Did they give a reason why they picked you over everybody else?
“It was basically the fact the council had asked all services to do an online service, but we did more than that - the food, the plants, we got more resources and just kept going. If we can do it, why not, was my theory and I think they acknowledged that. I think we set a standard because off the back of that the council asked me to do a matrix to help reopen services in order to make sure clients were just going to one service to reduce COVID infection. That's when they realised not all the services were contacting clients and taking care of them when Covid hit. Off the back of the matrix, clients were asking to come to us instead of the other services. Since then we've had way more referrals and clients.”
As always Kritan, it’s a pleasure to chat to you and hear your enthusiasm and hard work.
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