Blog - Watch TV? You Must Have Learning Difficulties

Is watching football all day, most days, a symptom of learning difficulties? My manager seems to think so.

You see, one of our clients does mainly that. Oh he goes out and does other things too, but the majority of his time is spent watching the footy.

My manager has decided that this is because the staff don’t communicate with the client effectively enough. The argument goes, that if we were good at our jobs, he'd suddenly jump at the chance of turning off his telly and doing x, y or z out in the community. Oh we need to improve in other things too (i.e. finding out about things in the community in the first place that he might like to do), but it’s the way we’re telling him about these things that we’re apparently failing at.

Now don’t get me wrong, I'm all for trying different methods of communication (pictures, videos, you name it) and finding out what might be the reason behind someone not wanting to go out (could be scared of bullying, running out of money, have some kind of phobia…) But once we have exhausted our options, I really believe that the clients lack of enthusiasm for the outside world might really just be that he would prefer to watch tv. It might be that simple.

When I tried to explain this to my manager, he replied ‘but that’s just sad’. So I told him that my preferred day off constitutes playing 12 hours of minecraft whilst wearing pyjamas and eating porridge. One of my colleagues laughed, but my manager just gave me a slightly annoyed/bewildered stare. I pointed out that if one of our guys did that we’d probably say it was a symptom of his learning difficulty, and that we needed to ‘do something about it’. I told him that all I was asking for was that whilst we try different methods of communication, I’d like it if we kept in mind that it might actually be our clients’ preferred method of enjoyment. (Adding a silent ‘and you keep in mind that his lack of engagement in the community might not be our 'fault'.)

I get that that’s what we’re supposed to do though – get him into the community. Our clients are funded by ‘supporting people’ (SP). And since the companies’ money comes from SP funding, our support is supposed to be tailored to the SP standard of working towards outcomes. (Joy of joys.) ‘Enjoying and achieving’ is a subsection in this list of outcomes.

And so the managers say – ‘Get them out into the community! You know, fresh air, new horizons, it’d do them good’. 

And of course it’s a tick in the ‘enjoying and achieving’ box that the SP funders look for when they come to evaluate our work. (But of course, we're working for our clients, not SP. In theory.)

It’s a shame that my manager thinks that neither watching football on the telly, or playing minecraft in your pyjamas, count as ‘enjoying and achieving’. Even though my client has learnt enough about football to win on mastermind, and I have built an aesthetically pleasing yet practical fort. I'm just lucky that I don’t have a team of people planning on an intervention any time soon.

~ Sally Forth