Down Syndrome Education International and Down Syndrome Education Enterprises CIC are relocating their UK head offices. The move is part of a wider restructuring that focuses on new research and wider-reaching services that better support early intervention and education for young people with Down syndrome worldwide.

Down Syndrome Education International and Down Syndrome Education Enterprises CIC are moving to new offices in southern Cumbria in North West England. The charity will close The Sarah Duffen Centre in Portsmouth, where it has been based since 1991, in mid-June.

The move is part of a reorganisation that is refocusing the charity on its core mission – to advance scientific research that improves early intervention and education. These changes will improve efficiency, enabling DSE to further expand its research and services to better support early intervention and education for young people with Down syndrome globally.

Building on three decades of achievement

Over the past 30 years, Down Syndrome Education International has grown from a small, local organisation to an international charity helping more than 150,000 people globally each year.

During this time, DSE has played a central role in scientific research that has advanced understanding of the cognitive and learning difficulties experienced by children with Down syndrome. The charity’s early work was inspired by the late Leslie Duffen and his daughter, Sarah, after whom the centre in Portsmouth was named.

The charity has funded – and continues to fund – research into reading and language development, memory, speech and communication, inclusion in education, behaviour and social development, autism, sleep, number and maths skills, and adolescence. Recently, DSE has completed the first major controlled trials of interventions designed to improve language and reading and memory skills for children with Down syndrome.

Ever since its first research project, DSE has sought to ensure that new scientific evidence is disseminated widely to inform more effective support and services. The charity has published newsletters, a scientific journal, books and films since the 1990s, and launched its first web site in 1996.

Today, DSE helps people in 180 countries. In the past 3 months alone, over 50,000 people have used our services and publications.

Better focused, more efficient and delivering more

For over 30 years, DSE’s most significant achievements for children with Down syndrome and their families have resulted from scientific research and widespread dissemination of evidence-based information and guidance. These are the activities that have led to lasting and profound change for many thousands of children with Down syndrome.

The restructuring will enable DSE to increase support for new scientific research. DSE’s research priorities are to identify effective interventions that improve cognitive development, speech, language and literacy skills, memory, numeracy, social development and wider academic achievement for children with Down syndrome. DSE has many important studies awaiting funding, including trials of practical interventions likely to be effective at improving speech clarity, memory skills and reading comprehension. Each of these has the potential to transform outcomes for young people with Down syndrome within a relatively short period of time.

Professor Sue Buckley OBE, the charity’s Director of Research, comments, “When we began our research 30 years ago, few people thought children with Down syndrome could learn to read or benefit from education. We knew little about the children’s learning difficulties and less about effective teaching methods. Today, many young people with Down syndrome are benefiting from knowledgeable early intervention and rich educational opportunities. Research, too, has moved on. We now know more about the children’s particular learning difficulties and this is informing better interventions. Today, it is increasingly important that we rigorously evaluate these interventions. Intervention trials tend to be large and require collaboration with multiple groups of researchers. This restructuring will leave us better placed to undertake a wide ranging research programme – increasingly supporting projects at universities in the UK and the US rather than primarily at our own facilities.”

The charity is also continuing to make it easier to utilise evidence-based interventions and teaching approaches through new, practical publications and online training courses and advice services.

Over the next 12 months, DSE’s range of See and Learn early teaching programmes will grow to include 15 practical kits supporting language and reading, memory, number and speech development. DSE will also start to release computer-based teaching activities, based on these programmes, on a variety of platforms, including apps for tablet computers.

DSE will shortly publish the handbook for the Reading and Language Intervention for Children with Down Syndrome that has recently been successfully trialled. In the autumn, the charity will be publishing additional resources and offering new training opportunities to help educators implement the programme successfully.

DSE will also be overhauling and updating all of its web sites over the next few months and re-launching the scientific journal, Down Syndrome Research and Practice in 2013.

As ever, what the charity achieves for young people with Down syndrome depends very much on the support of donors around the world. DSE’s work is unique and it both supports and complements the work of local and national support groups and associations.

To help support DSE’s research, publications and services you can donate tax effectively in the UK and in the US:

• Donate to Down Syndrome Education International
• Donate to Down Syndrome Education USA