At Swalcliffe Park School, we take a ‘Quality of Life’ (QoL) approach to hearing what our students and families want to tell us about what is important to them.
The starting point
We believe that the starting point for helping our students gain confidence and achieve what they want is getting a sense of who they are and who they want to be.
This involves finding out about their personal strengths and difficulties, as well as their hopes and aspirations, so we are best placed to help prepare them to do what they want to do now and after they leave school. We do this in a variety of ways, including separate weekly ‘keyworking’ sessions for students and families and termly QoL surveys. We believe this is essential information and we use it to plan our support in four key areas:
- Communication
- Self-management
- Achievement
- Independence
Skills for independence
The development and generalisation of Independence skills is a key aspect of our school curriculum and involves working closely with families to make sure we have an up-to-date understanding of what each student can do, can’t do yet and would really like to be able to do.
We also must balance this with an element of risk-taking, as we all did when we were growing up! This means making sure there is a safety net in place should things go wrong …. as, of course, they do from time to time!
With all this in mind, we have developed an ‘Independence’ curriculum, which has been written by our multi-disciplinary staff team and delivered by them. The inclusion of Speech and Language Therapists, Occupational Therapists and Clinical Psychologists in this team, as well as education and residential staff, ensures that our practical approach covers many aspects of Communication and Self-Management when putting independence skills into practice, for example on a visit to town or travelling on public transport.
Opportunities
Listening to issues that are important to families also means we can focus on what we can do together to improve family quality of life, so we look for opportunities where skills and experiences can be built into evenings, weekends and holidays so everyone can benefit.
Our QoL approach provides us with feedback from students and families about whether the activities and strategies we put in place are working, so that by working together we are making the most progress possible.
More information about Swalcliffe Park School
For more information about our Independence curriculum and Quality of Life approach, you can contact Kiran on khingorani@swalcliffepark.co.uk or visit our website www.swalcliffepark.co.uk and our ‘YouTube’ channel, www.youtube.com/channel/UC7DD8faNTgg3qmf6zJ4qr0Q
DfE No: 931/7007
CIO Registered Charity No: 1173113
Principal: Robert Piner
CEO: Kiran Hingorani MEd
