End-to-end understanding of the support journey
Delivered a comprehensive picture of experiences from diagnosis through to transition into adulthood.
Our work
Building the evidence base for better support for children and young people with vision impairment
Guide Dogs for the Blind partnered with 2CV to develop a robust evidence base that could inform policy, influence decision-makers and improve support for children and young people with vision impairment across the UK.
By combining lived experience with large-scale validation, we helped create a comprehensive picture of the support journey, identifying where systems work well, where they fall short and how support could better reflect the needs of children, young people and their families.
Sector:
Charity & Public Policy
Market:
UK
Expertise:
Policy Research, Social Insight, Evidence Development
The Challenge
Support for children and young people with vision impairment exists across the UK, but provision is often fragmented, inconsistent and difficult to navigate.
Guide Dogs for the Blind needed a defensible evidence base to understand how support is experienced throughout childhood and early adulthood, where gaps exist and how effectively current services meet the needs of families.
The challenge was to move beyond isolated experiences and create a clear, end-to-end view capable of informing future policy and advocacy efforts.
Our approach
We designed a multi-stage research programme that combined exploration with large-scale validation across the UK.
Our work included:
- A literature review to map the current support landscape and identify evidence gaps
- In-depth interviews with young adults, parents and families to capture lived experiences across the support journey
- Paired child and parent interviews to understand different perspectives on support needs
- A large-scale online survey to validate findings, quantify unmet needs and establish a baseline of experiences and perceptions
This approach created both depth and scale, ensuring recommendations were grounded in real-world experiences and robust evidence.
The Results
Evidence for future policy development
Identified where support systems are succeeding, where improvements are needed and how services can better meet family needs.
Long-term advocacy platform
Created a robust evidence base that Guide Dogs is using to influence government decision-making and shape future policy recommendations.
The bold decision
Rather than delivering a one-off research report, we helped build a longitudinal evidence framework that could track change over time.
By embedding a quantitative baseline within the programme, Guide Dogs for the Blind gained an ongoing measurement tool capable of monitoring progress, supporting accountability and strengthening future policy influence.
This transformed the project from a snapshot of experiences into a strategic platform for long-term advocacy.