Independent Skills
Moving into adulthood can be more challenging for young people with additional needs. Building resilience enables their independence and self-reliance, so they can feel empowered with moving forward with making choices and making decisions about their lives.
Having high expectations with building wider soft skills. What Are Soft Skills? will prepare students for adulthood. This also consolidates with the learning environment, such as students completing differentiated tasks, having increased motivation with their work, fostering social inclusion and increasing student opportunities.
Quality First Teaching promotes an inclusive environment where effective teachers engage the entire class, ensuring that every student has access to key skills and knowledge.
Emphasis on Soft Skills and support with becoming an independent learner.
Independence skills; problem-solving, and collaboration builds on the lifelong learning approach. This can be adapted and implemented across various educational settings and curriculum, making it a versatile and effective teaching approach.
When focusing on preparing for adulthood outcomes, such as independence skills, it can be helpful to use visual cues. These may help the pupil to sequence a task e.g.:
- Clear your desk
- Collect the equipment you need (with visual cues)
- Put the date at the top of the page etc.
Other helpful tips [Size: 3.5 MB, File: PDF].
Reminders such as mobile phone notifications; sticky notes, or visual sequencing cards are helpful. Also, using questioning to build on independence learning is a useful approach: step-by-step transfer of responsibility from the teacher to the student. Here is some examples of How to Improve Your Skills.
Wigan Council has also produced a useful Inclusive Quality First Teaching [Size: 300 KB, File: PDF] as an audit tool within the classroom.
This can involve differentiation to reflect individual needs, such as small groups during pastoral arrangements; a range of personalised supports that may include the use of visual timetable, schedule prompt or instruction sheets, independent access to physical resources that support independent skills and capturing voice of the young person:
The school and college’s Personal, Social, Health, and Economic education is a helpful way to incorporate independence skills and independence Living (Housing), as well as the four Preparing for Adulthood areas: employment, community engagement, independence skills, health, and wellbeing.
The PSHE Service is a traded service as part of Cambridgeshire County Council. They can provide guidance, consultancy, training, and resources to support and enhance the health and wellbeing of children and young people and their learning. They also provide a range of other resources to support primary and secondary schools in supporting their PSHE delivery and whole school approaches to wellbeing. For more information, please visit Cambridgeshire PSHE.
The Preparing for Adulthood Team worked with Samuel Pepys school students and school staff to produce an independent travel training film for young people with additional needs. We were greatly assisted by Great Northern Railway and British Transport Police in their endeavour with both the content, co-design, and the starring roles!
Our students’ goal is for the film to emphasis the benefits of taking public transport as well as the support available to assist passengers, so they have a comfortable travel experience. The short film also highlights how enjoyable using trains is, which is something Samuel Pepys students really wanted to share with other young people.
PSHE Education
Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education (PSHE) lessons.
- Suitable housing is important to someone with a disability. If it’s in a supportive community, it can give someone a safe and secure environment. Please have a look at our Housing section.
- Council for Disabled Children has a housing and support booklet to help people with Learning Disabilities find a housing choice right for them.
- Cambridgeshire Insight has future housing information and options.
- HomeLink is application process for going on the Register for Social Housing in Cambridgeshire. These slides give information about what it is, how to apply and some facts and numbers about the sort of homes that are available and waiting times: HomeLink Presentation slides
- Find out more about housing options for young adults in these slides: SEND - Housing and support when preparing for adulthood
- These slides give details of where to get advice, support and answers about a range of common housing queries that people may have. You can use them yourself or share with families or young people as needed. Questions like getting in touch with your district or city council housing team, how to find out what district or city council someone lives in, what to do about homelessness, rent issues, housing related benefits and other financial issues, neighbour issues, repairs to the property, moving house and more. These links will help you direct people to the right place to get the help or advice they need. Housing - sources of advice, information and support
- Find out about equipment, changes to the home and housing adaptations for children and adults: Cambridgeshire Online | Housing Adaptations
Free, curriculum-linked resources have everything you need to tackle the issues of bad housing and homelessness in your classroom from Shelter:
- Teaching Resources.
- Which Home? [Size: 386 KB, File: PDF].
- Home Needs and Wants [Size: 172 KB, File: PDF].
Lesson plans on life skills, financial and employability skills by Barclays Bank. They also have tools and activities to help too.
Twinkl has helpful independent skill worksheets.
