Day opportunities for people with a learning disability
Project Background
This Demonstrator project ran from September 2024 to August 2025. It involved two partners, each providing day opportunities in different areas of England. Persona Care and Support runs day opportunities in community centres across Bury, Greater Manchester. The Royal Borough of Greenwich provides and commissions day opportunities in its south London borough.
IMPACT supported Persona to co-produce plans to reconfigure its day opportunities around the aspirations of people with learning disabilities and prepare to introduce and evaluate service changes in 2026.
In Greenwich, this project aimed to strengthen a hub and spoke model of day opportunities, established in the borough following a consultation process in 2022. Our work involved developing the activities and co-production opportunities delivered within the hub, a large multi-use council building, and understanding and connecting the range of activities and services in the community, the spokes.
Collaboration with people with learning disabilities, including by drawing evidence from their families and carers, was central in both areas. The Demonstrator paid particular attention to engaging people with profound and multiple learning disabilities. IMPACT intends to produce resources on this type of co-production in 2026, as part of our theme on Enhancing voice, choice and control.
An evidence review produced in January 2025 supported this project.
IMPACT Factfile
- Year: 2024 – 2025
- Delivery Model: Demonstrator
- Four Nations: England
- Themes:
What are day opportunities, and why are they important?
Day opportunities support people with learning disabilities to do things that matter to them, including socialising, pursuing hobbies, learning and working, while ensuring they receive the help they need each day. A broad range of organisations, including independent providers, small businesses, charities and councils, deliver these activities in community settings.
Many people with learning disabilities have limited access to day opportunities, and some services offered narrow or mundane activities that restricted people to isolated buildings. Improving day opportunities was therefore crucial for helping people grow, make choices and participate fully in their communities.
What improvements do we want to make?
The Royal Borough of Greenwich
- Strengthen the hub and spokes by improving the coordination, variety and quality of local day opportunities.
- Share power with residents through peer-led activities and community services.
- Shape future services for priority groups, including young people transitioning to adult services and autistic adults with complex needs.
Persona Care and Support (Bury)
- Reconfigure day opportunities to focus on aspirations, progression, and what matters to each person.
- Use co-production to shape services, prioritising people with profound and multiple learning disabilities in planning and decisions.
- Develop varied, accessible and flexible activities that help people learn and gain more independence.
Project Progress and Outputs
In Greenwich, we:
- Designed and ran a co-production group, Great Future Ahead, based within the Greenwich day opportunities hub, to guide service improvements. This group is being sustained and is focusing on planning visits and activities around the local community with people with learning disabilities.
- Gathered evidence on how day opportunities are delivered across the borough, applying these insights to support collaboration across council teams and local partners through workshops and events to prioritise improvements to the hub and spoke model.
- Delivered a qualitative evaluation exploring staff perspectives on changes to day services and priorities for the future, interviewing 15 people across senior leadership, day opportunities management, staff at the hub, and a community sector partner.
In Bury, we:
- Involved more than fifty people in structured research conversations, including people attending day opportunities and their families and carers, which produced rich insights into what people valued and hoped for from day services in the future.
- Planned the reconfiguration of Persona’s day opportunities offer, and developed a co-production approach to guide the reconfiguration process.
- Developed training plans for Persona staff, with a focus on skills to co-produce with people with complex communication needs. The plans build on a partnership with the Challenging Behaviour Foundation during the project, which allowed Persona to draw on expertise from What Matters to Me, a three-year project that engaged people with profound and multiple learning disabilities, and their families and support circles.
Plans for the future
In 2026, we will work on a range of outputs to sustain and spread the benefits of the Demonstrator. These will include:
- Producing resources and campaigning to support co-production with people with complex communication needs in collaboration with the IMPACT National Embedding team, drawing on insights from Persona. This work will form part of our theme on Enhancing voice, choice and control.
- Finalising outputs from the evaluation of changes to day opportunities in Greenwich, with support from the IMPACT Evidence and Evaluation team.
You can contact Oli Smithson ([email protected]) if your organisation is interested in collaborating with IMPACT in this area.
Project Reflections
Something good from Bury
Bury, Greater Manchester, once cooked toffee. Adored locally and exported globally, Bensons Confectionery sweetened the town’s air and filled dentists’ wallets from the 1910s until 1989. Their famous red tins were decorated with a logo of a slightly sinister child with a toffee for a head and the strapline “Something good from Bury.” I’m too…
Meet Our Demonstrators: Oli Smithson
Oli Smithson
I joined IMPACT from the Health Foundation, where I led grant funding and strategy work on health and social care innovation. My interest in social care formed while working as a support worker at the beginning of my career. IMPACT offered a unique opportunity to combine my experience of service improvement with my desire to make a difference in social care, particularly for adults with learning disabilities.