TRAINING MATERIALS: Exploring Sexual and Social Understanding: An illustrated pack designed for working with people with learning disabilities

Karen Dodd, Keith Jones, Heather
Liddiard & James Stroud,
BILD
ISBN 190521801x,
£25

Star rating: 5/5

This new and exciting pack is incredibly versatile and easy to use, writes Julie Duncalf.

It is a “must have” resource for those working in the area of sexuality and relationships with those who have a learning disability. While others have used drawings to get the message across, this pack enables workers to use them for story telling, scene setting, sequencing and so on, both around sexuality and, more importantly, social understanding and concepts.

The pictures are downloaded from the CD-Rom that accompanies the book, allowing workers to print everything or just
particular images. The pack also includes a very good “capacity to consent” assessment tool for this area of work, which myself and a co-worker have found easy to use and effective.

While this pack has been designed for use with adults with learning disabilities I can see that it would also be very
useful with older teenagers as the key message is on appropriate social and sexual behaviour.

This resource succeeds in its aims to help to assess sexual knowledge and capacity to consent, and to teach good social
and sexual behaviour.

Julie Duncalf is day services manager for adults with learning disabilities, Isle of Man