ICE Teams up with Photosymbols

Sourcing images of children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) for use in publications and in particular for easy read documents has long proved problematic. Therefore, ICE has teamed up with Photosymbols, the leading online SEND picture resource, to create an image library that not only fills this gap but also represents the demographics of Essex.

To achieve this ICE invited a group of volunteers from Youth Create, an inclusive theatre group, to take part in a photo shoot.  A busy day of directing and posing resulted in nearly 300 images for the Photosymbols team to work with.

Now, after the painstaking post-production process the first of these images are accessible via the Photosymbols website.  This is an excellent result for ICE and Youth Create as organisations all over the country, including central government offices use Photosymbols in the production of easy read materials.  Indeed, the ICE commissioned images have already been put to good use by The Public Office in an easy read report, “Great Expectations” about transition services in Essex.

Jason Boyce, ICE Resource Manager, says “having pictures that are more representative of the youth of Essex is going to prove invaluable. We are delighted with what Photosymbols have done already and look forward to seeing more of our images online.

We have made a good start and don’t want to lose momentum; we are already planning our next shoot where we hope to break down some stereotypes!”