How Rhianna helps build confidence in young disabled people

How does your service support young disabled people? 

“About 40% of young people that we work with across Scotland identify as having a disability. They can have learning disabilities or have long-term mental or physical health issues, and we also work with young people who are neurodivergent, and who are hard of hearing or deaf,” Rhianna explains. 

“We tend to see that young people with some form of disability who come in for support have generally struggled at school because they’ve not had the right adjustments put in place to support them. 

“They might think that they aren’t that smart or that they’re not going to be able to do much. In that case, our first thing to do is to grow their confidence and explain to them that it’s not that they’re not smart, it’s just that they’ve not been taught in a way that suits their needs. 

“One-to-one support might work best for them, or they might really thrive in group work by having different personalities to bounce off. Work placements and volunteering can also build a young person’s confidence and help them to realise that they are actually pretty good at something. 

“If someone’s disability is linked to their mental health, we’ve also got a counsellor who can help. Even if young people don’t necessarily have mental health issues, I think when you’re in such a transitional phase in your life, it’s really important that you’ve got someone who you can talk with about what’s on your mind. 

“Another thing that we look at is practical support and making sure that young people know what benefits or adjustments they’re entitled to and supporting them through that process. When we’re talking to a young person about a job, we’ll ask them what support they’d need to do that job, and they might not know at first. So, we work it out together.  

“What we want is to eventually get young people to a point where they feel confident enough to advocate for themselves, but we’ll be there to advocate for them until then,” she adds. 

What skills do you help young people to develop?

“In terms of specific skills and training that we offer, it’s really dependent on what each young person needs and what they want to do. A lot of times, we start out by looking at improving a young person’s soft skills – things like building their confidence around teamwork, scheduling, routines, and time management.  

“We also help young people with the more obvious hard skills that you need to land a job, like how to write a CV or how to fill in an application form. We do a lot of mock interviews and, when they end up getting an interview, we do more tailored prep for the specific role they’re going for.  

“When any of our young people are starting a work placement or doing their first job interview, we can also go along with them for the first day and introduce them and so that they’ve got a familiar face there,” Rhianna says. 

What can employers do to better support young disabled people? 

“Getting a young person into a work placement or trial, instead of making them do an interview, can literally be life-changing, especially for young people who have mental health issues, learning disabilities, or who are neurodiverse. 

“Spending a few weeks or a month in a work placement can give a young person a good idea of what’s expected of them in their job, what their typical workday’s structure is, and what their workplace’s environment is like. Once they’re there, they realise it’s not as scary as they thought and, actually, it might even be quite enjoyable,” she explains. 

Supporting young people and their families in poverty 

“Providing support for young people and their families in poverty is ingrained throughout absolutely everything that we do. That’s one of the main reasons why it’s so important for us to offer whole-family support, so that we can help to increase the income of the whole household and not just one young person.

“Quite often, families don’t know what benefits they’re entitled to and that’s really important for us to address early on because when parents are on the breadline, we need to try to get as much money into the household as possible. 

“We’re also able to offer some quick fixes for emergencies through the Child Poverty Fund to help young people get into work. We’ve helped young people to buy work clothes, a bike to cycle to work, a laptop, and even hot, nutritious meals to eat at home. But these aren’t long term solutions.  

“I think the move to increase the young people’s minimum wage is great, but I wonder why they’re still being paid less if they’re doing the same work as others. If you're on £6.40 as someone who’s under 18, how could you possibly save for a flat deposit? 

What advice would you give to a young disabled person who doesn’t know how to start thinking about their future career? 

“You’ve got to understand that having a disability doesn’t need to be something that holds you back or is a negative thing,” Rhianna says. “I’d say celebrate your uniqueness and differences because actually, even if you don’t know it yet, your disability means that you have a set of skills that a lot of others don’t have.  

“The next thing that I would say is that you don't have to start off in your dream career the first time around – it’s OK to find something that just gets you a little bit of money, experience and confidence to help you better understand what you do and don’t like, and then you can learn from that and go from there. 

“There's no rush either – your own timeline is the best timeline, so I’d say to work towards what you want to do rather than what anyone else is telling you to do.” 

What's the best part of your job? 

“It’s all about seeing the positive difference in a young person – it’s not necessarily that they’ve gotten a job, but the confidence that they suddenly come in with because they've got a job makes it all worthwhile,” she says. “Getting a job is great, but it’s about everything else that getting a job brings someone, like the feeling that you’re connected to society or that you can go out with your friends because now you’ve got money. 

“It's just really nice to see how much young people can develop and grow their confidence in themselves in such a short space of time. It makes me feel good to know that we can help divert someone on a potentially negative path with just a little bit of kindness and someone who’s willing to listen to them.”