ABSTRACT
Children and young people are infinitely diverse. This chapter is premised upon this understanding and, as a result, acknowledges that children and young people experience opportunities, engagement and outcomes differently. This experience is within the individual child rather than the external provision. As consumers, each child or young person is unique and has distinctive requirements. In a rapidly changing consumer-led society it can be a challenge to identify common threads for such a varied group. Uncertainty and lack of confidence in knowing what some diverse consumers may look like or how to recognise their needs places pressure upon service providers. This pressure risks the providers’ ability to effectively meet the needs of the child or young person and their family. Society can fail to meet these needs effectively where there is inflexibility within the system and therefore an inability to categorise their specific needs and provide effective bespoke packages of support. Diverse consumers who are not neatly or easily sorted into categorised provision are at greatest risk of not having their needs met and are in many ways vulnerable. This vulnerability is often perceived as being within the child or young person but is more realistically a construct of the consumer-led system within services and society more generally. These children and young people include those with the most severe and complex special needs but there are also many others whose needs are not effectively met within the consumer society.
