• Where am I?
• Home »
• In Your Area »
• London »
• Harrow

Independent Travel Training in the London Borough of Harrow

VoiceAbility Harrow is working in partnership with the London Borough of Harrow to train individuals who use special needs transport to travel independently.

Learning what to do when using the transport, and what routes to take will help those with additional needs to access other services in their community. They will be able to be more involved, become more independent, gain confidence and learn new life skills.

In the words of our Director of Business Development, Paul Morrish, it will enable people who might otherwise have relatively small lives to have much bigger and more fulfilling lives.

For those who are not quite ready to take part in formal travel training, we will partner them with a long-term escort or ‘buddy’. These buddies will simply accompany their partner on their journey on a regular basis, helping them to get used to using public transport and letting them build confidence as they become more used to the routes.

When they feel able to take the next step to independence, we will move them into the travel training course.

We will be working with clients from 14 years upwards who could have a learning disability, physical disability, a mental illness or a sensory impairment. We will train them for a key journey in their lives, such as going to school, college or day centre, where they can use buses, trains or walk to their destination.

Training will be mainly on individual basis but will also include group sessions, and will cover learning a journey, public transport skills, road and personal safety skills, as well as people skills.  

How long have we been going?

The project kicked off in April and will run in the first instance to June 2012. This is a pilot project for the London Borough of Harrow as part of a review of their special needs transport service and will be reviewed after June 2012. The aim in the future is to include travel training and buddying as transport options as part of a new assessment service for existing and new service users.

What have we achieved so far?

So far we have had 17 referrals from Children’s Services, and have started travel training with some of these.

We have identified two young people as travel buddies and we are currently recruiting other suitable candidates.

We have also helped Harrow College in revising and updating their existing travel training programme to meet best practice, and in producing a new volunteers training programme.

We hope in the future to work together in training clients and sourcing volunteers.

What are we planning next?

We are planning to start training with a further 7 children in the next couple of months, identify more children for buddies and suitable volunteers, as well as picking up the promotion of the project with success stories of people trained.