Employment Programmes for Young People
Employment Programmes
The London Ability Supported Internship is a one-year programme for young people aged 18-25 with special educational needs and/or learning disabilities, who would like to progress into employment.
The programme enables participants to achieve paid employment by equipping them with the skills they need for work, through learning in the workplace.
This approach gives young adults with complex barriers to employment the opportunity to gain work experience and develop employment skills by working in a commercial business environment matched to their aspirations.
Programme structure
We offer a flexible structure, but typically individual programmes will incorporate the following elements:
- Assessment: Enabling us to understand individual goals and aspirations and make assessments as to ability levels. This will lead to formulating individual learning plans and realistic setting goals for personal development. The participant’s input into this is vital and gives them ownership of their own learning plan.
- Employability training: Focussed on assessment, building understanding of the world of work and employability skills. During this period tutors will be continuously assessing clients to inform setting up of placements. This period has the objective of preparing participants for real world work setting.
- Vocational matching: Placements are set up by London Ability’s experienced staff in line with the client’s aspirations. London Ability has a long track record of successfully placing people with learning disabilities into work experience placements and our experienced staff will work with each individual for find a placement that is suitable, meaningful and appropriate for them.
- Work experience: Participants have the opportunity to complete placements with local employers. Ideally, around 6 months will be spent learning in the workplace, on a supported internship placement.
- One to one support (job coaching and travel training): Participants work alongside staff at a range of locations in and around East London, supported by a specialist job coach. Travel support is provided on the public transport routes to and from work placements.
- Job brokering: During the latter stages of the programme, job brokering will take place, during which participants work with our project team and employers to focus intensively on securing positive outcomes.
Why our approach works
As we always explain to our participants: You can’t learn to swim without getting wet. Likewise, you can’t adequately prepare for the world of work by learning entirely in a classroom. “Learn by doing” is the ethos, and we believe that learning in a real-life work setting is by far the most effective way to build the skills and confidence required to acquire and sustain employment.
Some learners are not suited to the classroom but flourish in practical environment. Equally, the most effective way to demonstrate suitability for a given job is by actually doing it.
Our internship model allows us to front load support, enabling participants to gradually build their resilience and learn how to survive and thrive in the work environment.
Benefits of a bespoke programme
A key strength of our approach is that we are offering a bespoke service as opposed to a one size fits all programme. We do not simply take participants through a single predetermined process. Instead, London Ability treats each participant as an individual and a tailored plan is devised specifically for them.
This means we can deliver to a wide range of ability levels on the same project. It also makes it possible for us to run the project as a “roll on roll off” service without participants having to wait for set intake dates. The flexibility in the approach we use has already been recognised as a crucial strength in our delivery.
Unlike other internship models, we do not use a single employer or offer pre-arranged set roles. Instead we find it more beneficial to match individuals to bespoke placements in line with their unique interests and career aspirations. We have a range of employers that we work with and we are also adept at setting up specific tailored placements where necessary.