Event

Working Group – Youth

In recent years EPR members have increasingly expressed interest collaborating in the area of working with young people with disabilities. The joint work started off in December 2020 at the (online) National Awareness Raising Event (NARE) in Germany where a number of EPR members presented their services and programmes for young people with disabilities. In addition, EPR is currently leading 2 Erasmus+ projects with members focused on young people, Jump2Job and TransitAction.

On 17 May and 30 June 2021, two meetings were organised to start off a thematically focused exchange and mutual learning on services for young people with disabilities. The participants identified a number of topics of common interest: 1) Adaptation of services to new demands in the labour market for young people with a disability or mental health issues and to their specific needs; 2) Improvement of the employability of young people with a disability or mental health issues, including by addressing motivational issues for them to learn; 3) How to effectively accompany and support a shift to hybrid models of learning, teaching and training; 4) Inclusive education – successful models to learn from; 5) Organisation of trans-national exchanges for young people with a disability or mental health issues.

In the second meeting, field 2) was taken up with an exchange on “Transition Management” for young PwD from school and training into employment, illustrated with a good practice example from Northern Ireland. The EPR Secretariat gave an overview on relevant EU policy frameworks and funds in the fields of youth policy and child and youth welfare, pointing out the policy initiatives and the programmes thematically most strongly linked to the training and support services provided by EPR members.

The meeting organised on Zoom on 31 March served three main aims: First, discussing and agreeing on the work programme for 2022. Second to have an exchange on inclusive education, i.e., how to make it happen and how to best address key challenges. As you are all practitioners, this exchange also focusd on adaptations to the services you provide needed and on what are the preconditions to realise inclusive education. Third, starting the exchange on a key aspect of EPR’s annual theme, pathways to employment, in our case on transitions from education and training into employment for YPWD. It fed into a publication of good practises and an event on the topic. The forth aspect shortly addressed is the EU-level policy and programme framework, in particular the European Year 2022 on Youth.

Participants were asked to fill in the registration form by 28 March 12.00 at the latest.

This event was for EPR members only.

This event receives financial support from the European Union,  from the ESF programme.