ThinkForward- Building inclusive design capability and coaching
Creating innovative employability initiative for young people with special educational needs for ThinkForward
Thinkforward inclusively designed tools hanging up
aims
ThinkForward’s current programme coaches the most disengaged young people between the ages of 13 and 18 to help them to succeed in education, develop social skills and progress into sustained employment. This project focused on helping ThinkForward to design a new programme to provide further educational support for young people with Special Educational Needs (SEN) aged 13-18.
We helped the ThinkForward team to understand the needs of young people with SEN at key stages of their lives. We carried out co-design sessions with young people with SEN that were currently on the ThinkForward programme. Within these sessions, we looked at the key stages of the current programme and worked to identify where there were opportunities for further support for young people with SEN. ThinkForward staff members helped to facilitate this session, and by doing so learned more about service design methodologies.
Thinkforward inclusively designed introduction cards to make speaking about interests fun and easy
process
We created tools to provide the team with further context of what daily life is like for this group of young people. One tool, for example, was a series of ‘Get to know me’ cards. This activity involves cards that have various icons on (E.g football, music notes and mobile phones) and an A4 page with an animated character in the middle. First, we ask people to pick a character they like and the we encourage the them to pick up, expand on and place the cards on an A4 page. This activity meant that at the start of the workshop we all got to know the participants and they got to know each other.
Creating an exercise like this for a workshop with this age range was particularly important as it can often be difficult to ask teenagers to open up about potentially sensitive subjects. This also gave us a way to talk about forms of communication and hobbies which were then particularly relevant to the design of the new programme.
Thinkforward inclusively designed journey step cards to help make talking about key steps to understanding my career path fun and easy to map out
Outcomes and impact
From this workshop we gathered user needs, current pain points, highlights and plotted out what an ideal programme to support them might look like based upon the current ThinkForward programme. We later turned these needs into recommendations for the programme design. The outcome of this project not only helped ThinkForward to design the new programme in a way that will better meet the needs of young people with SEN ,coaches and stakeholders but it has also helped to prioritise areas for improvement across the full ThinkForward programme.
Key Project Activities
User research
Co-design workshops with parents and young people
Current service blueprinting
Future service blueprinting
The creation of design principles
Service design coaching