Young people with special needs preparing for adulthood

In year 9, if you have an education, health and care (EHC) plan, your school will arrange a meeting with you to talk about how you are getting on, and your hopes and fears for the future. The transition service can be invited to come along too. After this, you will have a review meeting each year until your final year at school.

The year 9 education review is the starting point for planning your future, but we can get involved at any time. If we haven't met you at a review meeting, or you are not in education, you can get in touch with us yourself. Other support agencies may also refer you to us.

You can decide whether you would like to use the transition services that we offer. It's flexible, so you can dip in and out of support up to the age of 25 years.

Next steps

If we've been supporting you as a young person with a disability, we will try to make sure your pathway planning is completed close to your 16th birthday. In your final year of education, or as you get nearer to your 18th birthday, you can have your first care and support assessment to look at your future in the short and long term. This will give you a chance to have your say.

You can decide – together with a parent or carer, your support or social worker and any agencies that are helping you – a support plan that agrees what needs to happen.

You get to meet regularly with your support or social worker to review your plan. You can talk about what is working well or what is not working so well, and decide what the next steps may be.

Making decisions

You will be making the decisions about you. Together with those who know you best, we will help you in making those decisions.

We will need to know what's important to you, what you want from life, what can be achieved and how we could help to make it happen. We will support you in whatever you want to do unless we believe your choices would be too much of a risk to you or others.