I started Patcham High School about a month ago and had work experience last week.

I did my work experience at Scope. Scope is a charity organisation that supports disabled people and specifically people with cerebral palsy.

Cerebral Palsy is a group of conditions that inhibits the movement of an individual, causing physical disability.

I have done a lot of volunteering in the past. However, I haven’t felt as fulfilled as I did after being at Scope for a week working with the customers.

I worked Monday to Friday 9am-4pm. It was an experience I won’t forget.

My duties were to support customers while in activities such as dance, sensory cookery, massage and many more; to support customers over lunch and to clean at the end of the day.

The most important thing to me was communicating with the customers. I could understand that even just spending twenty minutes with someone was appreciated.

However, I appreciated it as well because it made me feel happy and it felt fulfilling. I learnt that disabled people are still segregated to quite a large extent in our community and I want this to change.

Working at Scope has given me a new positive outlook on life. The staff were kind and professional and I even had the opportunity to run my own sensory activity on my last day which went well.

I want to say thank you to Scope for this and especially to the customers for letting me work with them. I enjoyed the friendly upbeat atmosphere which everybody created.

On Friday, mopping the dance studio floor on the last ten minutes of the day while listening to The Jackson Five, as I did every day, there was a tear in my eye. I felt sad it was my last day and thought of what a fantastic time I had.