In the dog house

Dogs that can retrieve cash from ATMs and empty washing machines help disabled people lead more independent lives, but can they also help reform disruptive teenagers?

Midhurst in West Sussex is about as well-to-do as any small town in England. A mile or so outside, in a converted farm surrounded by peaceful, rolling hills, is the headquarters of a charity called Canine Partners. The centre is dedicated to the training of assistance dogs - mostly Labradors and golden retrievers. Here the dogs learn the extraordinary skills they need to help give independence to disabled people.

Last summer this rural calm was shattered by the sound of teenagers screaming and swearing. Five youngsters had arrived to be taught how to become dog trainers. They were disruptive, violent or painfully shy, and they had agreed to be part of a unique experiment.

CP's head trainer Nina Bondarenko, who made her name training Rottweilers in her native Australia, had dealt with "stroppy" teenagers before and thought the teenagers would not be too much of a problem. "Then I met them and I thought OK, this is going to be a bit more difficult," she says.

It was to be the start of a traumatic learning curve for her and an emotional journey for the youngsters. The idea was simple. Kids really like dogs and the skills involved in training them - patience, consistency, rewarding good behaviour - could provide the young people with the discipline they need in their lives.

This kind of scheme was pioneered in America, where assistance dogs have been used with problem kids in High Schools. The results these projects claim to have achieved are impressive: school attendance up by more than 70% and major increases in self esteem. The teenagers involved in the UK experiment were put forward by local schools in West Sussex, who had run out of ideas of how to deal with them.

Liam was typical - 14 years old, sullen, aggressive, foul mouthed and about to be permanently excluded from school. Allie, Rob and Ellie, while completely different characters, had similar problems - inability to concentrate, dislike of being told what to do and serious anger problems.

ASSISTANCE DOGS CAN...

Open doors

Help people dress

Help with shopping

Call lifts

Pay in shops

Only Katrina was different. Painfully shy to the point of agoraphobia, Katrina suffered from depression and had taken herself out of mainstream education.To help run the course CP teamed up with youth development charity Fairbridge, experts in working with challenging kids, and it was lucky they did. The course was nearly over before it began.

On only the second day of training youth worker Jason Cummings was having serious doubts. He thought the youngsters might struggle with the amount of time they were going to have to concentrate. Their screaming, swearing and mucking about was also seriously disrupting the training regime of the dogs. The dogs themselves are trained using a system of rewards - when the dog does what you want you give him a treat and you ignore the behaviour you don't like.

Parents might notice a similarity with bringing up kids. Dogs, like kids, need boundaries; they need consistency in order to learn. Once fully trained, a CP assistance dog can carry out dozens of tasks, including unloading a washing machine, calling a lift, retrieving the TV remote control and taking money from a cash machine. They can transform the lives of people who use wheelchairs.

Gradually, working with the dogs began to have an impact on the kids. But, in order to fully appreciate the significance of what they were doing, the kids needed to meet the disabled people who benefited so much from having these dogs, the charity decided. The meetings had a profound impact on the teenagers. Liam was typical. After a journey to London to meet Eileen Hobson and her dog Sailor, he changed his ways and his unlikely friendship with severely disabled wheelchair user Eileen blossomed.

Two months into the course Liam began to connect with the dogs too - particularly a young yellow Labrador called Aero. The relationship flourished to such an extent the dog often knew instinctively what the teenager wanted him to do before he'd even asked. "He just knows," says Liam. His school noticed a phenomenal change in his whole outlook. "More than anything I see a confident and happy young man, any negative feelings I had about him have gone - it's been superb," says his year head Nick Brown.

The course had a profound effect on Katrina too. At the beginning she was so shy she struggled to even leave her house. After a couple of months with CP she managed to confront her fears by giving a talk about the charity to an audience of more than 40 college students. Her parents were overwhelmed with the transformation.

All the kids went through an emotional journey and all of them gained something real from the experiment. Whether three or four months can change them forever remains to be seen, though so far the signs look good. Ellie is now doing work experience at a kennels and Liam is working one day a week at CP itself. They are all more focused at school.

It wouldn't be practical to roll out such a scheme on a national scale, but there are serious lessons to be learnt from it and increasingly youth workers are seeing the value of animals in working with kids. For Nina, it's a wider issue about our whole approach to young people. "If you look at society, kids are not positively reinforced, they are always told they are wrong."