Tony: Dean is a local boy born in Middlesborough but at some stage of his early life, he was moved to Scotland into what can only be described as an asylum. Dean was spotted sitting in a corner, pulling the skin off his fingers. The person who spotted him made enquiries into Dean and when he found out he was from Middlesborough he asked the Social Services if they could get him moved back closer to home. And we finally got Dean down to Ransdale House and that was 14 years ago.
Three years ago the local colleges informed us that Dean could not go back to college due to the fact that he was unable to pass exams and therefore was no good to them, they needed exam results for the funding. This left a major void in Dean's life. We then had to think of some other way of filling in his time.
Meeting with the staff and management, it was agreed that we would buy a workshop. This is the shed that we have here. We then had to decide what we were going to make in this workshop. Dean enjoys gardening and we decided we would try to make a few planters. As you can see Dean loves to paint, he's very good at it and he won't leave that alone until it's finished properly.
From there we went on to other things, looking through magazines, seeing what other little things we could do for Dean. We saw little, what do you call them...? Ladybirds! Which were very simple to make but were very beautiful when they were finished. We've found more and more that Dean is capable of doing an awful lot, given the opportunity, and he doesn't have to get certificates here.
Dean is very fast when he is doing anything like this. He was exactly the same at college. He was doing three times the work of other students and they just couldn't keep up with him then. I think that was one of the reasons that they weren't too suited to having him. That's the side that Dean painted himself and I must say it only took him five minutes.
With Dean being deafblind, we were a little bit wary of what to do. A young man came from a home in the south who worked with deafblind clients and he gave us the idea for a sensory garden. He said because of Dean's limited sight, he can still see shapes, he can still see certain colours, so colour was something that we should really have and also touch and that was the reason we set up this sensory garden.
We have six clients in Ransdale house and they've got to be the best clients in the country. I would never leave Ransdale House, I think I'd miss them too much. It's an absolute pleasure and delight to be with them.