What a great day at Learning Disability Today conference in London. Lots of people really enthused about using The Q-Kit to help people to talk about their support service. Really humbling to know that people know about the work that we are doing and were seeking us out to speak to us. Many many thanks to everyone that spoke to us. We are so pleased that so many people believe that people who live within a service or receive support have the absolute right to be enabled to speak about their experiences and their dreams! Once again a huge thank you to our friends at Ability Housing for stopping by to support us and another great opportunity for our two Q-Teams to meet. We will be posting more pictures and more thank yous soon on our Blog and on our Facebook page and on our Twitter feed. We also run a network for people interested in sharing ideas and thoughts on involving people in checking and directing their support services and you can sign up here https://www.yammer.com/thequalitycheckingnetwork if you want to share stuff or see what others are doing. Thanks again for reinvigorating our cause!!

The Q-Team had a great day at the "It's not on" hate crime conference yesterday at Hove Town Hall. We thought that the presentations and the workshops were interesting, educational and thought provoking. We are committed to sharing everything that we have learnt with all the people that we meet. Particular thanks to Grace Eyre and Speak Out for the materials and workshops we attended, thanks to Stay Up Late for an eye-opening and entertaining workshop and the inspired anti-hate crime songs we created, the Safe In The City campaign that is helping to protect people in their community, Stop Hate UK for all the work they are doing to prevent hate and prejudice, The Fed community safety team for providing advice to vulnerable people, Southdown Housing and others for supporting the event and to everyone else involved in such an important conference and cause!!

We have been reviewing and cataloguing some of the outcomes from The Q-Team's visit to learning disability services over the past two and a half years and there have been quite a few!  These have ranged from helping tenants to have their rooms decorated in a way that is more personal to them, to helping a tenant move to another house all together. Here are some of the others: people being supported to go out when they want; people being supported to discover new things to do; people being supported to understand where they can meet new friends; individual tenants being more involved in choosing a meal for them and in preparing it; clients ceasing daytime group activities they were not enjoying. To find out more about how The Q-Kit and The Q-Team help people talk about their lives, and represent them to make their voices heard,  come to our training. We will help you empower the people you support to enable you to take the guess work out of providing a great service!!

Great day at Oska Bright Film Festival in Brighton!! We saw some amazing and inspiring films and it it was great for the Southdown Q-Team to meet with the Ability Housing Q-Team. We really enjoyed sharing time and ideas together and we look forward to meeting up again soon!

The Q-Team offer training on The Q-Kit and how to set-up and run a team of service user quality checkers. We consider The Q-Kit to be a permanent beta version that can and should be continually improved to help increasing numbers of people to be meaningfully engaged in assessing their support services. The training is designed to share both The Q-Kit and everything that The Q-Team has learned over the past two years. It also provides attendees with access to The Q-Kit Forum, which is an on-line network of people already using The Q-Kit. The forum enables the opportunity for collaboration in the development of The Q-Kit. Every development that we make is shared on the forum including standard letters, easy read reports, video reports, a touch-screen version of The Q-Kit, an audio version of The Q-Kit and an ongoing support network. The forum is also contributed to by other organisations that are using The Q-Kit such as Scope, Ability Housing Association, Robert Owen Communities and others. We would love to develop a community of organisations and authorities working together to continue to try to improve the lives of the people that we support, by finding increasingly creative ways of meaningfully engaging them in checking the quality of their support services. If you want to form part of the partnership why not sign up for our January course?

What a lovely sunny autumnal  Friday! The Q-Team are very excited to be going to the Oska Bright film festival on Tuesday where they will be meeting up with two other quality checking teams using The Q-Kit to assess support services. The Q-Team from Ability Housing  and the I-Team from Grace Eyre. It will be great to share stories and ideas with other people doing the same thing.

The Q-Team are offering two free places to The Q-Kit training course in January 2014. For a chance to win one of those two places all you need to do is complete our one question survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TG3FQV7. This is not a hard question and we don't want to catch anyone out but it would be good to know how others feel and what people think might be the obstacles.

The the new Q-Team member's have today started their first day of training to become Quality Checkers. Today's training will include an introduction to The Q-Kit, how The Q-Kit defines quality, the skills that people who use services can bring to help others and of course where the tea and coffee is :) Good luck new recruits!!!

The Q-Team are pleased to announce that they

have recruited a further 6 quality checkers from different service providers across East and West Sussex! Congratulations to the new recruits!! The new recruits will commence their 9 week training programme on Wednesday 13th November. The new recruits, as well as helping us with quality checks, will also be helping us to create focus groups to discuss what should be included in the new Q-Kit for day services. If you want more information or if you would like to attend our training for service providers Involving people with Learning Disabilities in assessing their support., please contact me email.

Exciting news! The Q-Team have been working with a film maker to create a film to help to explain a little of what we do and how we do it. The filming was completed a short while ago and has now been edited and is ready to go! So please, have a look at our little film and tell us what you think...

The Q-Team have just begun directing and filming their reports where previously they have only wanted to be the actors. It was a great session and everyone got really involved and became enormously professional about the whole thing with cries of "silence on set" and "action". All future video reports and filming will be directed, filmed and star The Q-Team members. Next stop the editing room....

Some great outcomes from a Q-Team visit this month. The Q-Team spoke to people at a service and observed interactions between staff and clients. They also used their experiences of visiting lots of other services to provide some feedback on how homely and personal they felt the service was.... The Q-Team sent a report with lots of feedback and suggestions that the service might have considered challenging. However, the service has taken on board all of

the feedback provided by the team and has written a full action plan based on the report! The Q-Team are very pleased and proud of the service for being so proactive in trying to address any issues that have been raised by their clients. The Q-Team are looking forward to our re-visit to see what has changed!!