The importance of providing training to support people with their personal and sexual relationships

As Skills for Care prepares to launch its new training materials for care workers to support people with their personal and sexual relationships, Tracy Girling, Identity, Sexuality and Relationships Lead for Sense shares why it’s so important for care workers to be skilled and confident with this subject.

Sense supports people who are deafblind or have complex disabilities, and Sense’s values have always been about the rights of people to live an ordinary life, and not be left out of life. We have a proactive policy on sexuality and relationships, and we established sexuality and relationships training towards the end of the 1990s. Yet, this subject area can still prove a challenge, and we know that there’s lots more that can be done.

When I first received training in the topic, as a Sense support worker 25 years ago, the importance of people’s rights around sexuality and relationships, was as clear then as it is today, but putting theory into practice proved not very easy. There were still barriers both institutional and social, and there weren’t many resources accessible for people with learning disabilities. As for resources for people who are deafblind, whose main learning route is through touch and experiential learning – they were almost non-existent.

Sexuality and relationships can be a confusing subject for any of us. Think about your own experiences, how do you make sense of your feelings - physical and emotional, or your sense of identity? How do you express them to others? Let alone trying to work out how other people think and feel about you, and what’s expected in the tricky world of making, and breaking relationships.

You probably had the benefit of some sort of sex education; opportunities through the years to talk with your friends, peers and siblings, and definitely lots of incidental learning through various media that you watch, read, hear or actively search for. You’ll have learnt through experience and trial and error, about yourself and other people and about the building blocks of relationships and how they develop. You’ll have had successes and made mistakes and learnt about what you like or dislike to inform your future choices. And to add to it all, your experiences, choices, and outcomes will be very different to the next person’s.

For people with a learning disability, sensory impairments, or complex disabilities, many of these routes of learning or experiences are missed out or distorted. This leaves people with gaps in their knowledge and understanding about an already complex, personal, and arbitrary subject.

It’s the role of support providers, to help people fill those gaps in learning, to gain experiences safely, and yes – to make mistakes. And let’s be honest, this is not an easy thing to do.

It’s not only the arbitrary nature of the subject that makes it difficult for support workers, but the expectations upon them. The role of a support worker is to enable and support people to do things they want to do so they can have a good quality of life - from cooking meals, to supporting activities and work placements, to booking holidays. Support workers are often the ones who help people find what they want and need, to make things better.

So, when it comes to making friends or finding a partner, it’s often the cause of frustration and disappointment that their support worker can’t do the thing that they hope will make them really happy. That disappointment can be difficult for both the person concerned, and their support workers to deal with, when they don’t have magic relationship wands to wave and conjure up a best friend or partner.

It can also be difficult for those of us providing support to observe people taking risks and making unwise decisions. We have a duty of care to people to avoid risk of harm, especially where people may not have the understanding to do so themselves; but it shouldn’t be to the detriment of people learning from experience. Staff have a professional duty of care -and also generally an instinctively caring nature that means they don’t want to see people hurt or upset - but as we know, experiencing emotional upset, hurt, disappointment, distress and loss can all be part of the ups and downs of relationships. And we need to let people experience this, not protect them from the downs but support them through it, as much as the ups. Again, we don’t have a magic wand to wave to make those feelings of heartache, jealousy or betrayal go away.

When I deliver sexuality and relationships training to support staff, I let them know that they’re likely to leave with more questions than answers, and that I don’t have any magic relationship wands to hand out.

The important thing about the training is that people leave knowing they can ask questions and open the conversation.

They’ll learn what support providers can and can’t offer legally – but also the importance of how their own values and experiences might influence how they support people with the subject. They’ll acknowledge duty of care whilst still enabling people to take risks and make unwise decisions. They’ll learn about the ever-developing mix of resources to help fill people’s gaps in knowledge and that there are campaigning and networking groups out there, such as Supported Loving and stayuplate.org, and self-advocacy groups such as My Life My Choice and Campaign for Change, that challenge the barriers and obstacles, including those established by support providers or funding authorities.

More recently at Sense we’ve had an enforced break from face-to-face training due to covid, but we’re using the time to update our sexuality and relationships training. The launch of the Skills for Care and Supported Loving guidance is perfect timing to get us back on track and fully updated.

Skills for Care and Supported Loving have developed a package of training materials to help social care employers develop the skills and knowledge needed to support people who draw on services with personal relationships. 

View the training materials and further guidance.

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