31 St Johns Church Road

31 St Johns Church Road

31 St Johns Church Road provides a specialist service to adults with a mild to moderate learning difficulty and associated challenging behaviour. The project focuses on developing skills and competencies that enable people to live more independently and participants in this programme are expected to move rapidly through supported living. The project concentrates on helping to develop useful routines and occupations, including workplace activity and continuing education. Service users are actively encouraged to take control of the running of their home and to learn the requisite skills to know how to do this.

Challenging behaviour is addressed through a distinct collaborative approach that recognises the legitimacy of the behaviour and attempts to influence change, rather than impose control or sanction. It is our belief that most challenging behaviour represents the best way a person has, at the present time, of responding to their needs or overcoming the challenges they face.

This is quite often influenced by past experience or by a disruption to the usual processes of learning. We provide one-to-one person-centered counselling to help participants overcome past traumatic events and move on from them. We have a variety of interventions designed to teach people the skills necessary for more effective and successful human interaction, including specialist and sexuality counselling, mentoring and participation in bi-annual residential personal development courses. Our personal development courses are uniquely designed to teach people the soft(?) skills that underpin successful interaction; the absence of which, quite often, reinforces mal-adjusted behaviour. These include, for example, communication skills problem-solving, team working, leadership, personal awareness and confidence building. We work with a specialist provider to deliver these courses at various locations around the UK. The courses use the outdoor environment as a vehicle for demonstrating these essential, but difficult to teach skills. Outdoor pursuits provide participants with fun and often exhilarating experiences, whilst at the same time teaching in a manner that effectively compensates for a person’s learning disability.

In the home, episodes of challenging behaviour are treated as opportunities for people to reflect and learn. To this end, our approach is non-confrontational and designed to promote a good understanding of mutual rights and responsibilities, and good citizenship. Essentially we endeavour to promote and reinforce alternatives to challenging behaviour.

Participants in the project are encouraged to plan for their future by setting short, medium and long-term goals. These invariably include moving out of residential care and getting a place of their own. To this end, we have a thriving supported living project, in which we are able to provide high quality accommodation and experienced person-led support, at a level appropriate to people’s continuing needs.

This process is underpinned by a robust Contract of Residence that specifies clearly our mutual rights, responsibilities and expectations. This forms a powerful reviewing tool.