200 Lives
This NIHR funded project asked 107 adults with learning disabilities living in supported living or residential care about their lives and the support they got, as well as how much people’s services cost. The research team included people from Manchester Metropolitan University, Changing Our Lives, the National Development Team for Inclusion and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
There were 10 key messages from the project:
- Supported living can work well for people with higher support needs
- Residential care services were more restrictive in some ways
- Including accommodation costs, residential care is more expensive than supported living
- Only a quarter of people in supported living had their full housing rights upheld
- Who people live with is more important to them than the property itself
- People liked being able to put their own stamp on their home
- What people want from a house might change as their aspirations change
- People in supported living felt more connected to their local community
- People’s routines often revolved around household tasks
- People want to feel part of their local community
Lots of information about the project in different formats, including videos and podcasts, can be found here. Changing Our Lives led on an extension to this project called Small Margins. This project worked with people with learning disabilities, autistic people and their families from minority ethnic communities who either lived in their own home (supported living), lived in residential care, or were moving out of inpatient hospital settings. An easy read Small Margins report can be found here. A full Small Margins report can be found here.
Academic journal articles from this project
Ribenfors F, Blood L, Hatton C & Marriott A (2025). “It’s got its ups and downs”: what people with intellectual disabilities living in supported living and residential care like and dislike about their home. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 38(1), e13313
Blood L, Ribenfors F, Hatton C & Marriott A (2023). Moving house: How much choice do people with learning disabilities have about where they live? British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 52(1), 140-149.