Warwickshire Employment Support Team (WEST)

[Aeolienne]

With the recent news that my contract will not be extended beyond mid-March (more information here) I now face the prospect of looking for work again. I was tipped off about an agency that could support me looking for jobs in the Warwickshire area.

Just to clarify, I am not from this area originally (see my intro thread for a partial bio) but I would prefer to stay around for a bit. I know it's important to be geographically flexible, but OTOH it's so bl00dy expensive to move for each job, especially with my track record of long gaps in between.

Anyways, I was given a leaflet about WEST (Warwickshire Employment Support Team) which describes it as "a county-wide service for people with a learning disability or who are on the Autistic Spectrum [sic], who want to work and who meet the criteria for Fair Access to Care Services." It also said, under "Eligibility for a Service", that "Customers must have been assessed by a Social Worker [sic]", although the person who gave me a leaflet said that the mere fact that I had a medical diagnosis of Asperger's would be enough. So I gave WEST a call and spoke to someone who said that they usually deal with referrals from social services but there's some other scheme that would enable me to be referred directly, or something like that. They should get back to me by next week.

I then had a look at WEST's website, which only mentions learning disability, not the autistic spectrum. How helpful is it likely to be?

 

[toothless]

hi aeolienne,there are services out there that dont need referring from social services, have you tried googling? i know of one called united response but i dont know how far south they go.
the worst comes to the worst,you can request a commmunity care assessment from the SS,your legally entitled to one,and through that you could request a referral to the team.

as for learning disability,some organisations including the one im supported by [and even more many staff within all these orgs] still wrongly class autism as a learning disability,im guessing you already know this but for the benefit of american readers;learning disability in the UK means intellectual disability,having an IQ 70 or under and the functioning/developmental dysfunction to match,so it annoys me when they label any form of autism under learning disability,its actually supposed to be labelled under learning difficulty which doesnt link intellectual capacity to the disability/impairment.
ive personally took it up with several orgs as to why they use learning disability and not learning difficulty for autism and other similar impairments,the high up staff ive spoken to in particular dont even know what learning disability means, i reckon the problem is these orgs are not getting the right training.
anyway,sorry thats my rant i shouldnt do that in other peoples threads, but i understand your frustration,and i think you should write an email about your frustration with their lack of information-ie,do they support plain 'vanilla' autistics [ie autists with out LD] or do they only support LD?
if you would like,i could email them for you?

 

[Aeolienne]

I've already been told (by Autism West Midlands) that there are no services for autistic adults in Warwickshire, although someone else at AWM says she's investigating on my behalf. Very odd that the services should be so elusive that only someone in Birmingham can track them down...