Communicating with Children who have a Disability: Capturing their Views and Wishes

Overview

The need to successfully capture the views and wishes of children is a concept that is both philosophically shared as well as embedded in legislation. Those working with children who have a disability need to draw on a skills base of creativity, flexibility and advocacy in order to ensure the voice of each child is captured, valued and used to influence and enhance the quality of their lives and experiences. The course can be delivered over one or two days. A two day course will allow participants to spend more time exploring the outcomes outlined for day one as well as meeting the additional outcomes for day two.

Who is Communicating with Children who have a Disability: Capturing their Views and Wishes aimed at?

All those who work with disabled children

Course Length

1 or 2 days

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be offered the opportunity to: 

• Considered communication in its widest sense including non-verbal communication and behaviour
• Reflected on previous experiences and identified both good practice and factors that may have hampered effective communication.
• Discussed how to capture and reflect the voice of the child.  
• Become familiar with range of Alternative and Augmented Communication tools and resources that are used to aid communication, including hi-tech and low-tech systems.
• Explored how to ascertain the views and wishes of children who don’t use a specific method of communication. 

Additional learning outcomes for 2 day course

• Consider how best to plan direct work, including the child’s developmental ability, the use of augmented and alternative systems of communication and how to make use of all the opportunities that are available for direct work including that which is planned and that which is spontaneous.

• Explore the scope of activities that may be used as part of direct work and the resources available to support this

• Understand the role of observation in direct work and good practice in relation to the evaluation of observations.

 Where relevant this course can be tailored to enable participants to consider how to link direct work to Quality Standards and other outcomes identified with and on behalf of children.