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help

A powerful, simulated learning experience for social work students exploring intimacy, care, and agency through the lens of lived experience.

As part of a creative partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University’s Social Work department, we’ve developed HELP – a performance-based learning environment where disabled artists lead, provoke, and collaborate with students on the threshold of professional practice.

This is a training session with a difference; examining empathy, discomfort, decision-making, and care.

Through simulated performance and workshops, social work students engage directly with narratives drawn from lived experience. Each scenario is developed and performed by Uncurbed artists, built around the complexity of real lives and the subtleties often missed in paperwork.

Together, we ask:

What if access meant emotional openness, not just wide doors?

How can services centre human agency, desire, and dignity?

HELP is co-production in action.
It’s art in service of practice.
It’s preparation for care that’s human, not just procedural.

The Experience

Help is a bold participatory performance and facilitated workshop for trainee social workers. Through a live monologue, we witness "Jemma" receiving care as her support worker tends to her, the audience hears a candid and unapologetic Voiceover – Jemma's needs, desires, and agency heard.

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Facilitated Reflection

Following the performance, we lead you through a reflective workshop and case study. We create a space to unpack:

How services can better centre human agency, desire, and dignity

How care often ignores intimacy

How ‘risk’ is culturally constructed

It’s training that challenges you to listen, reflect, and do better.

Book help

Want to embed lived experience into your teaching, training, or professional development?

HELP offers an unfiltered, disabled-led approach to exploring disability, care, risk, intimacy, and agency – the nuanced areas often missing from traditional training.

We collaborate with:

Universities

Health & Social Care training providers

Social Work CPD programmes

Together, we build bespoke versions of HELP that meet the needs of your students or staff.

What we offer:

Bespoke adaptations of HELP for student cohorts or professional settings

Simulated encounters performed by disabled artists

Reflective workshops and debriefs led by lived-experience facilitators

Optional: Integration with curriculum or CPD requirements

Why partner with us?

Participants deepen their awareness, challenge internalised bias, and confront the discomforts that can shape – or limit – their practice. The result: more humane, inclusive, and reflexive approaches to care.

Let’s talk about building a partnership that works for your organisation.

With thanks to project partner Manchester Metropolitan University.