Supporting Disabled Children, Young People and their Families

We asked you to comment on the content and format of a public resource that would look to provide information, based on the lived experiences of disabled children, young people, and their families across three pillars: rights and information, accessibility of support, and transitions.

The information you reviewed in the consultation document was to be developed into a website and would include “Life Stories” which reflect real life experiences of disabled children, young people of their families and would be written by young people or their parents or carers.

We worked with disabled children and young people, their families and third sector partners to design the draft content we asked you to review.

We asked for your comments on the information in the resource, to let us know if it was relevant to you and if there were any other important issues which you thought we should include or other resources that would be helpful to signpost.

105 responses were received, of which 62 were from organisations and 43 from individuals. Respondents have given a wide range of views as well as suggesting further topics for consideration.

The Scottish Government made significant changes to the document to reflect the very rich and helpful responses to the consultation and the analysis of the information and comments we received.

The analysis report is available by following this link to the Scottish Government website.

One of the findings was that information on healthy relationships would be appreciated by users of the site. To address this, the Scottish Government hosted a workshop and asked young disabled people to help shape the content.

To address concerns raised about accessibility of the website, policy officials looked at the content again to make the language more accessible and the content more user and action focused than policy focused.

A large number of signposts to additional resources and services available to disabled people and their families were added at the suggestion of respondents.

Supporting Disabled Children, Young People and their Families Consultation
The Scottish Government commissioned British Sign Language videos of key sections of the site. An Easy Read guide to the resource and how to use it will be produced and made available on the site. Further usability testing was carried out with stakeholders prior to the launch.

The Supporting Disabled Children, Young People and their Families website was launched by the Minister for Children and Young People, Maree Todd, at an event on 24th April attended by young people who had provided life stories and their families and carers. The website is available here.