Rushton Futures is the adult social care division of the Royal School for the Blind Charity, Liverpool.

We are a day service providing person-centred outcome driven support for young adults who are described as having complex needs. 

It started in 2016 when the Trustees of the Royal School for the Blind Charity, Liverpool sought to provide a continuation of care for young adults leaving education with a lack of adequate provision within the city region. 

Rushton Futures supports young adults who are described as having complex health needs and sensory impairment.

We are part of Liverpool City Council Adult Social Care Provider list for Learning difficulties, Autism and Sensory Impairment, but we receive referrals from Liverpool, Halton, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley, Warrington and Cheshire West.  

Referrals come from commissioning teams and social workers in both Social Care and the NHS. 

Rushton Futures seeks to meet person-centred outcomes for people described as having complex needs in the following areas: 

Wellbeing – this includes areas surrounding primary care needs including but not limited to hygiene, personal care, nutrition and fluids, medication management, postural management, rescue medication. 

Feeling Connected – this includes reducing social isolation and developing beneficial friendships. 

Feeling Relaxed – this includes supporting young adults manage anxieties, their mental health and reducing the medical impact of such. 

Movement and exercise – this includes keeping physically active or having access to interventions which support posture management, pressure release and increased range of movement and circulation.  

Rushton Futures has referrals across the city region which indicates the lack of provision for young adults with complex health needs in the Liverpool City region.

Although there are a range of social care provisions in Liverpool, few offer regulated activities and interventions for the range of complex health needs that Rushton Futures do.

With the development of medical science, the young adults who are experiencing care and support at Rushton Futures might not have reached adulthood a decade or two ago.

This means that the need for person-centred services and a continuation of support transitioning from children’s to adult services is becoming an increasing need.

The Rushton Centre would serve as a hub for good practice across the city region. 

We currently share a site with the Royal School for the Blind Charity, Liverpool in Wavertree.

We share values, principles and training with the school which is considered Outstanding by Ofsted.

Each year we are able to support young adults transition, where necessary, from the school provision into the adult day provision.

Being in the same building as a school is problematic for young adults as a continuous safeguard between children and adult services.

The new Rushton Centre, like all good adult social care provisions need to have the people we support at the heart of their community moving away from historic segregated institutional approaches.  

We are part of a wider care network within Liverpool. Many of the young adults we support have wrap-around support which includes carer support outside of Rushton Futures, safeguarding oversight and Merseycare referrals.

Head of service meets once a month with all other services leads for adult day support throughout the city who are part of Liverpool Provider list facilitated by the commissioning managers.  

We work alongside careline and Liverpool Social Workers for safeguarding oversight for all service users who are Liverpool residents.  

We also work alongside Merseycare for all health referrals and intervention plans for the young adults we support. This includes the Learning Difficulties team who support with speech and language therapists, community learning difficulty nurses, behaviour specialists, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, community dietitians.

All these interventions are set up with an individualised plan for each young adult we support as part of their care plan which is continuously reviewed. 

We get referrals and enquiries for placements several times a year from social workers from the transitions team and from individuals with a personal health budget.

Unfortunately, due to our current service provision being based on the first floor, we are limited by the number of young adults who we can support upstairs requiring the use of an evacuation chair in emergency circumstances and so we have to turn down some referrals who await either a gap in provision or for a suitable ground floor, accessible provision. 

As highlighted above we work alongside Merseycare. But for individuals who attend Rushton Futures whose primary need is health, their placement is funded through NHS, either through the Clinical Commissioning Group or through a Personal Health Budget.

Our support and interventions try to keep the young adults in our care out of hospital to live happy and healthy lives. 

Each service user we support has an individual package of support based on their highlighted support needs.

Fees are paid through the local authority contracted placement or direct payments (Social Care), or through NHS funding via Clinical Commissioning group or Personal Health Budget (Health). 

The Care Act 2014 set in legislation that the core purpose of adult care and support is to help people to achieve the outcomes that matter to them in their life. Each individual who uses the Rushton Futures service has an individual Care File, a crucial part of their individual plan is their ‘Outcomes’ section where we discuss with, where possible the person themselves, or their families, carers and advocates what the individual wants to do at Rushton Futures.

What does the individual enjoy?

Why does the individual want to come to Rushton Futures?

What are the outcomes they want / need us to help them meet?

These are then formed within our four outcome areas of: 


Wellbeing 


Feeling Connected  


Feeling Relaxed 

Movement and exercise. 

Each service users outcomes and what they are seeking from Rushton Futures are individual to each person, some outcomes for service users include: 
Being around peers and forming friendships 
Time out of their wheelchair and physio plans 
Health needs met through medication and dignified care 

Rushton Futures is considered a vibrant setting, which offers person centred care relevant to a diverse group. We have a high relational focus and this is one major aspect of our support model.  

Our service began in September 2016, as a new provision so our longest standing level of support as part of Rushton Futures is six years. However, there are many who attend our service who have attended Royal School for the Blind Charity prior to transitioning into our service, so our charity scope of support for some has stretched decades. 

We have strong relationships with parents and guardians as part of the wrap around care we partner with them in. Many we support do not use verbal communication and so we use an app called Brightwheel to communicate daily and report met outcomes. Our service partners with families by caring for those who attend Rushton Futures and provides much needed carer respite for primary carers, parents and guardians.

We have an amazing staff team with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

We adopt values-based recruitment rather than training and experience based as we offer in-house training for all aspects of the care and support we deliver.

We therefore have a range of experiences operating in similar roles ranging from staff who left school with few qualification who undertook Health and Social Care Apprenticeships while on the job, to those with first class honours at undergraduate degrees, to those who are experts by experience.

Compared to the wider health and social care environment, we have a very large number of younger staffing members, which combined with the experience of their colleagues fosters and builds relationships with those we support of a similar age opposing a carer: cared for power imbalance.   

10 of our staff are live in the Wavertree area where we are based. The rest live inside the Liverpool City Region 

We have strong links with local universities, especially Liverpool Hope University who we have a formal partnership with through the School of Social Science.

We have formal student placements in the field of social work and disability studies.

We give annual guest lectures across a range of subjects within the school.

We have had over 20 students on placement with us from Hope in the last five years and have recruited seven graduates into their first formal employment role following graduation and offer part time roles for staff who study alongside their employment.   

We have a number of staff who began their time working at Rushton Futures as apprentices, after the conclusion of their NVQ, they went onto apply successfully for full time Key Worker posts with us.  

Our ‘Group Leads’ are a line of five middle managers who have all been internal appointed as a promotion from Key Worker to Group Lead.  

Our appraisal process is called ‘Performing for Success’ which sees staff meeting with their Line Manager for an appraisal every 12 weeks.

Staff have the opportunity to formally raise any additional training interests in this meeting as well as informally chat around training in the work week.  

A recent example, is a Key Worker expressing an interest to learn more in the area of Adult Safeguarding. She raised this in her PFS and our Safeguarding and Quality Assurance Manager has sourced and arranged for the staff to attend a Level 3 Safeguarding Adults Training. The staff is pleased with this support and looking forward to furthering their learning on this training. 

Since 2016 we have seen nine staff internally promoted from an Apprentice to a Key Worker. Five staff internally promoted from a Key Worker to Group Lead and one staff promoted from a Key Worker to a Training and Delivery Supervisor.  

A new premises will support staff within a sector which finds retainment a challenge. The building designs include an investment into staff support with staffing breakout and training areas for what is a physically and emotionally demanding role. It is our desire to continue to invest in our staffing team and create stronger workforce links within the wider social care network through training, conferences and events through our current expertise and partnerships. 

Our current premises is based in the same building as a SEND School in Wavertree. This is problematic for a number of reasons: 

It subtly recycles a disabling notion that people who may be described as having learning difficulties remain in a state of childhood. The people we support in our service are adult men and women and being associated with attending a school could maintain a disabling stigma.  

There is a safeguarding risk attached to combining childrens and adult services within the same building- we have worked hard to establish a relationship between the school and our service so that both users are safeguarded through appropriate measures but the risk remains there and would be further mitigated by offering a separate building.  

In order to mitigate the current safeguarding risk our service currently operates on the first floor of the building. The majority of our service users do not have the ability to exit the building via the stairs and so during an emergency we would have to transfer our service users into evacuation chairs, descend the stairs and exit the site. This is time consuming and high risk activity. We need a ground floor accessible provision. This emergency exit protocol limits the amount of people we can support and for those we do support remains as a risk in emergency circumstances. 

The area we use is too small for the size of our service and the scope of support we can use. We have refurbished the upstairs area of the first floor of a very old building, the extent to which accessibility works in practice is limited by the size, scope and age of the building.  

The service users we support should be at the heart of their community, and our service desires to adopt an affirmative model of disability, for this to happen we need a site which the local community can benefit from. At present this is not possible because visitors would have to enter the school prior to getting to our part of the building. This cuts off relationships and means we as a service have to work harder to reduce a segregated provision.  

The activities we offer are limited by the size of the areas we use and the equipment needed to support the young adults, most service users benefit from the use of medical beds, hoists, positioning wedges and floor matts, so the lack of space limits the amount of meaningful group activities possible when those we support are out of their moulded wheelchairs.