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The success of Connexions services for young people with learning difficulties could be jeopardised unless more money is made available, it was revealed last week.

Roger Allen, team leader of eastern England Connexions partnerships, told delegates at a national conference on learning difficulties and Connexions that many chief executives of Connexions branches had expressed "concern about the resource implications" of delivering the service to young people with learning difficulties.

Margaret Palmer, a career service manager who is developing Connexions services in the eastern region, said that the responsibilities of Connexions personal advisers to young people with learning difficulties were "very resource intensive". Many personal advisers, who provide one-to-one support to all young people, were struggling to meet these specific responsibilities and to find the time to attend review meetings, she added.

Review meetings to plan for a young person’s future beyond schooling became mandatory from January this year for all children with a special needs statement. But Palmer said they were felt to be an unnecessary task creating extra work for personal advisers, because young people with learning difficulties tended to stay in education until they were 19, so plans were being discussed "several years too early".

Although Connexions services are expected to work with people with learning difficulties until they are 25, research into some local schemes found that many staff lacked the skills to deal with people with learning difficulties and more money was needed to train them, Palmer said.

Lack of awareness of learning difficulties was leading some personal advisers to have very low expectations of some young people’s potential work or training abilities.

Other problems identified by the research were a lack of clarity over the role of the personal adviser, who too often became responsible for plugging the "chasm" between Connexions and social services, and a feeling that personal advisers were "ineffective" because they had no direct access to funding.

- The Partnership Working and Community Development Conference was organised by the National Development Team.