Your Service, Your Rights Evaluation

The NDIS was created to support participant choice and control. However, the NDIS Quality and Safeguarding Framework acknowledges that some people would need time and tailored support to confidently exercise their rights. In response, the NDIS Commission launched grant rounds to fund education initiatives focused on participant rights. 

In 2021, Inclusion Australian received a 2-year grant from the NDIS Commission to roll out the Your Service, Your Rights project – a national education program for people with an intellectual disability. Teams of facilitators, with and without a disability, led workshops about rights for people with an intellectual disability. The project aimed to protect the rights and promote the health, safety and wellbeing of people with an intellectual disability. Inclusion Australia led the national rollout of the program in partnership with disability organisations from across Australia. 

Inclusion Australia engaged ARTD to deliver an evaluation of the Your Service, Your Rights pilot project to inform learning and support reporting to the NDIS Commission.  

We worked closely with Inclusion Australia to maximise the limited budget available for the evaluation and ensure that data collection was not too onerous for partner delivery organisations. The evaluation drew on: 

• administrative data to understand program reach 

• a pre- and post-survey to capture participant outcomes 

• separate interviews with managers and facilitator teams from partner delivery organisations  

• a survey for service providers who had hosted workshops and/or used the YSYR educational resources.  

In line with the principle of ‘nothing about us, without us’, our approach was inclusive and accessible and recognised the expertise of people with an intellectual disability. We recruited 3 young people with an intellectual disability to work as co-researchers on the evaluation. The co-researchers were involved in designing the interview guides for facilitators, ensuring they were accessible, co-conducting interviews and helping to make sense of findings.    

Overall, participants and facilitators were highly positive about the project. The evaluation showed that the project resulted in several positive outcomes for participants, including increased knowledge of their rights, how to make a complaint and ways to have a say in what happens in their service. It also produced key learnings for the Your Service, Your Rights project and Inclusion Australia, as well as learnings for the NDIS Commission around improving accessibility and further embedding knowledge of rights. Inclusion Australia uses findings and learnings from the evaluation to inform future project design and delivery. This includes refining data collection methods and shaping project activities, for example by allowing greater flexibility and more effectively incorporating project member feedback.  

Working with co-researchers with an intellectual disability on this evaluation had positive impacts for the project and enabled co-researchers to learn valuable skills. Co-researchers’ involvement in the interviews made them more accessible and enjoyable for interviewees with an intellectual disability, and interpreting findings together helped us focus on what really mattered to people with a disability. At ARTD, we also learned valuable lessons on how to make our processes more accessible for people with an intellectual disability (and shared our reflections in a blog).