Inter-Agency Collaboration in the Transition from School to Adulthood of Students with Disabilities: A Narrative Review of the Literature

ABSTRACT

Students with disabilities face many difficulties in their transition to adulthood and are therefore supported by various individuals or organisations. Hence, a collaboration between family, school, health, and social services as well as other services is needed throughout this process. This narrative review aims to highlight important components of an exemplary transition coordination practice. The framework selected for this study is Kohler et al.’s Taxonomy for transition programming 2.0 (KTTP), the most prevalent and well-described proposal we could find to elaborate and evaluate transition for students with disability from school to adult life. It includes a practice category named inter-agency collaboration. We analysed the published studies included in this review and categorised relevant information within the items of the inter-agency collaboration category of the taxonomy. Overall, results show that collaboration through the transition process is deemed necessary but currently not fully implemented. To this end, collaboration training and the presence of a school transition team seem to be important contributing factors to improve inter-agency collaboration. Results are discussed in light of future research aiming to implement best practices with regards to school to adulthood transition of students with disabilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative framework
• collaborative service delivery
• inter-agency collaboration
• review
• students with disabilities
• transition coordinator
• transition team; transition from school to adulthood

Disclosure Statement

There is no conflict of interest to disclose.

Notes

1. For the Inter-Agency Collaboration practice category, Collaborative Framework includes 11 items and Collaborative Service Delivery includes 8 for a total of 19 items. They are listed in Tables 3 and 4.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from the CIRRIS; Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en réadaptation et intégration sociale;