Domiciliary Support Agency

ESPA's Domiciliary Support Agency provides a variety of community based support. This can include supporting individuals within the workplace. This can be commissioned by Local Authorities or purchased by personal budget holders or through Individual Service Funds.

ESPA has had discussions with Job Centre Plus who have indicated that Access to Work money can be devolved to ESPA to provide specialist support to people in work or about to start work. This money can be used to provide support, transport etc. 

Contact Jan Jameson, Manager
Email : jan.jameson@espa.org.uk

ESPA Transitions Service

ESPA has 2 residential transition services for specific college leavers. 

A number of the students are in supported employment. These services offer intensive support to promote independence and work.

Contact : Mike Smith   Email : mike.smith@espa.org.uk

Supported Work Placements

We offer internal supported work placements to people in our residential services to enable them to develop employability skills. Many people we support are also engaged in a variety of volunteering roles. 5 people have recently become Durham Rangers.

Training and Development
          
An Employability Course has been delivered for day service users at The Croft Centre (ESPA’s Sunderland based day provision)

ESPA have a professional training service. As a specialist provider we want to share our knowledge and experise with others who are involved in assessing, supporting or commissioning services for people on the autism spectrum. We deliver a wide range of scheduled courses from awareness training to a 4 day course for professionals which has been quality assured by Northumbria University. We regularly also deliver bespoke courses to a variety of organisations specifically designed to meet their training needs. All of these courses could be delivered to employers, job coaches and other training providers.

Contact details: Gill Linfoot  
Website www.espa-training.org    Email : gill.linfoot@espa.org.uk   
Tel : 0191 516 5080

Structured Learning

Selected staff across ESPA have participated in Structured Teaching Training to provide an autism specific and highly structured approach to learning new skills. These approaches can also be used to support individuals in the work place. Identified staff are also attending an intensive Training in Systematic Instruction which is a specialised job coaching technique that compliments Structured Teaching.