Young refugees and asylum seekers will be given a key voice in a unique conference on the involvement of service users and carers in social work education and training.

The Living and Learning Together Conference in Birmingham is being jointly hosted by the General Social Care Council (GSCC) and the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE).

The young refugees living in Huddersfield will be given a forum to express their experiences of the asylum process in one of the many workshops running on the day. They will talk about how they became involved in an innovative art project at the University of Huddersfield involving social work students.

Members of the project, Besmir, Abdullah and Mastan said:

“We are a group of young people aged 10-17 who are seeking asylum. We took photographs of places in Huddersfield that were special to us, we wrote about some of these places and some of the good and bad things that had happened to us in Huddersfield to help students who are going to become social workers understand more about our lives.”

The conference will promote the viewpoint of the service users and carers though a selection of workshops, such as the one detailed above, and a theatre presentation by ‘Red Rose Chain’, with the aim of highlighting best practice in the contribution service users can make to social work education and training.