Findings and recommendations

By doing action research, young people with learning difficulties, disabilities and/or special educational needs can make a significant contribution to school and college development.

In the ‘What about us?’ project, we asked young people with learning difficulties, disabilities and/or special educational needs what it was like at their school or college. We wanted to know what was good about their setting, what was not so good and what they would like to change.

When we heard what was important to the young people who were working on the ‘What about us?’ project, we encouraged them to do something about it.

We asked the adults to let the young people decide what they wanted to do for their part in the project – so they could work on what was most important for them. We suggested they might want to find out more about why something worked well or to think about how they could change things to make them better.

Each young person in the project worked as a researcher in their school or college. They used what they found out to plan improvements and to drive forward changes in policies, practices, provision and environments.

The young people were the ones who made the plans, took decisions and directed their project. This was not always easy for the adults. They were not used to standing back and letting the students run things. They had to learn to let the young people take responsibility for their own actions – to make some mistakes, but to learn lots of new skills on the way.

The young people came up with some exciting and original ideas. They collected views and suggestions from other students and found out how things worked.

They designed their own projects and did work that led to significant changes in their own schools and colleges – and often in other settings too.

The ‘What about us?’ project suggests that young people, given the right opportunities, can bring about positive changes in their own lives and in the policies and practices followed in the schools and colleges in which they work.

We suggest:

• Young people can make a powerful contribution to institutional development – involving young people with learning difficulties, disabilities and/or special educational needs in doing research should become a key strategy for school and college improvement
• School and college-based participative action research should focus on issues identified by young people and carried out by the young people themselves.