Background: There is a strong ethical case and an urgent need for more participatory research practices in disability research but a lack of resources to support this. It is important to involve people with learning disabilities and carers at all stages, including when designing training for co-research. Methods: We co-developed training materials…

In this paper, the authors review life stories in learning disability research and practice since the 1960s. Although there is consistent evidence of their value in giving people a voice and an identity beyond the service label, they are not widely used in the provision of health and social care. This is despite long-standing policy commitments to…

This article traces and summarises historiographical trends in the history of learning disability. It identifies three major waves of historical approaches beginning with a medicalised analysis which emerged in the early 20th century. This presented a story of medical progress which began with the asylum movement of the 19th century and…

My name is Paul Christian. I am a Black British man with learning disabilities. The lives and experiences of Black people with learning disabilities are underrepresented in the UK history of learning disability. This article explains my involvement in activism to change this and shares the learning from these projects. It discusses the process of…

Background: In 2006, the United Nations agreed the "Convention On the Rights Of Persons With Disabilities." Article 19, 'Living independently and being included in the community' sets out the 'equal rights of all persons with disabilities to live in the community, with choices equal to others…' A generation earlier, a small group of…

This paper reviews the challenges faced by a team at the Grace Eyre Foundation in running a coproduced oral history project during the pandemic. It examines the benefits and challenges of working online, comparing this to face-to-face approaches. For over 100 years, the Grace Eyre Foundation has provided support to people with learning…

It is perhaps inevitable that the academic study of learning disabilities is often undertaken by established scholars with little lived experience of the condition. So, what has it been like for someone from outside the academy, with a long career in the arts, who is also the father of a severely learning-disabled young man, to write a book-length…

In the UK, policy on adult social care places an emphasis on maximising choice and control for service users, including people with learning disabilities. The shift from the provision of organised services for groups of people to offering individual and personal budgets and pots of money for people to buy their own services has major implications…

Paul Burstow, a former minister for social care, was once charged with finding savings in care services. He completed his last two years, cut the Valuing People Now programme early, and returned to the back benches. He did, however, draft a Care and Support Bill and has subsequently used this experience to chair a joint Parliamentary Scrutiny…

Paul Richards is one of those individuals who make a difference and is as far from institutional as one can be. The author met up with him at the Learning Disability Today conference in London to talk more about his work and life. Paul coordinates the service user involvement across Southdown Housing Association, based in Sussex.

This paper describes the current challenges facing nurses and other professionals who care for people with profound and multiple intellectual disabilities. This particularly vulnerable group of service users often rely on a repertoire of non-verbal behaviours to communicate their needs and wishes. These challenges include the requirements of…

Social inclusion and citizenship form the key objective of "Valuing People Now" (2009), but achieving this meaningfully with people whose behaviour can challenge services remains elusive for many services. This article describes the philosophy, development, operationalisation and evaluation of a person-centred day opportunities and supported…

This is about research an Oxfordshire Self-Advocacy Organisation did into annual health checks for people with learning disabilities. The self-advocates worked with Oxfordshire's Primary Care Health Facilitator and a Professor to find out why only one in four people in our area had a health check in 2009/10 (Emerson & Glover 2010a,b). The…

This paper aims to describe the process undertaken by Speech and Language Therapy and Occupational Therapy to assess a gentleman with learning disabilities and visual impairment with regard to his capacity to sign a tenancy agreement. It describes the method used to assess the gentleman's mental capacity before exploring the system used to provide…

Promotion of service-user and carer involvement is part of the mainstream policy agenda in health and social care ["Crit Soc Policy 25" (2005) 164]. Much effort has been invested into involving people with learning disabilities in decisions regarding aspects of their lives through advocacy projects and the utilisation of person-centred planning…