ARU Final Report

10 Young people with disabilities’ experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic too. Toste et al. (2021) also found no research exploring the perspectives of secondary school students with disabilities during the pandemic. Our literature search supports this claim of a paucity of research in this space; data recorded about the experiences of young people with disabilities was often collected from parents and carers and not young people themselves (see for example The Disabled Children’s Partnership, 2020 and Rogers et al., 2020) and no UK studies were found exploring these direct experiences. Meanwhile, there has been a proliferation of research into the impact of Covid-19 on young people more generally. 2.2 The current study Literature related to the experiences of children and young people with disabilities during the Covid-19 pandemic is sparse. Where research does pay attention to these experiences this has been from the perspectives of parents and carers. However, we know that young people want to be involved in decision-making around the support needs of those in similar situations (Roberts et al., 2020; Street Doctors et al., 2020). This approach enables the development of support that is responsive to their needs, rather than ad hoc or adult presumed (Larkins et al., 2020; O’Brien and Dadswell, 2020; Roberts et al., 2020). It is therefore important to explore the experiences of young people with disabilities during the Covid-19 pandemic from their own perspectives. The current research was part of a wider project led byBirminghamUniversity and Essex CountyCouncil and funded by the Department for Education. The wider study explored how social care services have supported children, young people, and their families during the pandemic across six local authorities: Cornwall, Essex, Hertfordshire, Medway, Stockport and South Tyneside. Essex County Council invited researchers from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) to collaborate with them to ensure that the voices of care leavers and young people with disabilities were represented in the wider project.