Risk has played and continues to play an important role in shaping access related policies and services for people with learning difficulties (Alaszewski and Alaszewski 2002; Seale & Nind 2009)). People with learning difficulties are generally regarded as being an ‘at risk’ group and many current policy and research publications highlight the very real risks to them in terms of poor treatment by others, lack of available opportunities and poor physical and mental health and social well-being (e.g. Department of Health, 2001). Key policy documents however, are beginning to adopt a different tone and focus in relation to risk, stressing instead the need for risk management and positive risk taking. For example in the UK, The Department of Health (2005) talk about empowering social care workforce to be more innovative and to take the risk of enabling people to make their own life choices, where it is appropriate to do so. Taking risks can take us outside our comfort zone and perhaps even be stressful. Our research questions focus on how we can can develop our understanding of how learning difficulties services respond to the potential stresses of positive risk taking and how this might influence their ability to maintain and develop long term successful positive risk taking practices. We therefore draw on the concept of resilience to explore what might influence the ability of those working in learning difficulties services to take positive risks and handle the consequences of stepping outside the comfort zone. Resilience is broadly understood as long lasting positive adaptation to adverse situations such as stressful life experiences or trauma (Luthar et al. 2000). The ability of people with learning difficulties to deal with the risks and stresses of their lives, as evidenced by their resilience, is argued to be influenced by risk protective factors which are either internal (e.g. personal characteristics) or external such as families and the wider social environment. (Cosden 2003, Wiener, 2002). Whilst it may be useful to use this conceptualization of resilience to seek to understand, at an organisational level, the experiences and processes that foster resilience, it is limited in that it views risk as something negative or traumatic that requires an ‘extraordinary’ survival response that some people are capable of and others are not. Such a view would seem to be overly pessimistic and out of tune with the positive risk taking discourse.

A different perspective on resilience is provided by Goodley (2005) who offers a more socio-cultural framework, where resilience is viewed more as a political response to disabling and disempowering circumstances. He argues instead that resilience is contextualised; complicating; optimistic and an indicator of disablement. In this conceptual paper we will map out how Goodley’s four aspects of resilience might be applied to learning difficulties services and workers. We offer some examples of this application that are drawn from narratives and reflections of people with learning difficulties, practitioners and researchers. We use these examples to illustrate how: 1. Resilience exists in response to negative and positive experiences of risk taking. 2. Resilience challenges previously held views about the nature of access 3. Resilience encourages us to assume the potential for positive risk taking 4. Displays of resilience capture the wider inaccessible environment in which they have to be made.

Goodley’s notion of resilience is attractive because it suggests that access workers and access services may develop a resilience that enables them to take positive risks, not because new government policy requires them to, but because they see the injustice and inequality inherent in learning disability services and wish to change things. We suggest therefore that resilience is likely to be required of access workers and access services in order for them to both support the positive risk taking of people with learning difficulties and to take positive risks in the access work they do. It may not be a direct response to risk, but it is influenced by access related contexts in which risk management and positive risk taking take place.