Caring Friendships- Series Breakdown
Image has a picture of James Hanley, with a short description of his job title as an Educational Lead and SEN Consultant, and Amanda Attram’s photo below, with a short description of her job title as Qualified Therapeutic Counsellor.
Friendships are a complicated thing for anyone, sometimes more so for individuals with Down’s syndrome or special educational needs. From making friends to ending friendships, the complexities of human relationships are often harder for these children and young people to interpret and act upon.
Learning for Life’s newest series aims to tackle some of these difficulties, by identifying the components of friendships and how to approach them. In this series, we see James and Amanda discussing a wide range of friendship issues.
Image shows 10 graphics each green, blue, or pink, in two columns, with one labelled ‘Caring Friendships’ at the top left, and each thereafter showing the number and name of each video: 1. Friendship; 2. Features of Friendship; 3. Identity and Values; 4. Choosing Friends; 5. Making Friends; 6. Healthy and Unhealthy Friendships; 7. Repairing Friendships; 8. Ending Friendships; 9. Caring Friendships.
The aim of this series is to provide guidance on how to make friends, ensure friendships are caring and beneficial, and how to end friendships when necessary. The Primary Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education Curriculum in England covers Caring Friendships, which this series teaches. For children and young people with SEN, it is important to teach this in an age-appropriate and accessible way. As with all our series, we have made this in conjunction with specialist teachers.
Alongside the video resources, we provide downloadable, physical resources for you and your young person to work through during each video. For each of these, James and Amanda follow worked examples, before prompting you to pause the video and try the activity yourselves. If you are familiar with our other Learning for Life series, or even our Teach Me Too project, this is similar to how we set up some of our other series in both projects.
These videos may prompt further questions from the young person you are working with, and that’s okay. We encourage you to use each video as a springboard for further discussion and activities that can be fully individualised for your learner. Whilst we aim to cover as many areas as possible, we understand that young people may be curious about other issues around the topic. If you don’t know how best to address these questions, why not join our Facebook Community Group, where you can ask questions to the wider group and to members of the Learn and Thrive team.
Key questions about this series:
Why does my child need to learn about ending friendships?
Young people should be fully equipped with the required skills to understand how to end friendships that are no longer fulfilling them or that are making them sad. Unfortunately, people may take advantage of the preconception that young people with SEN cannot always understand when a friendship is not benefiting them. We want to make sure that they can identify when a friendship might not be in their best interests anymore, and how to feel empowered to end it where necessary.
Why ‘caring’ friendships?
Caring is a good umbrella term for how we are trying to teach about friendships. We teach that there are many different elements to friendships and that they may mean different things to different people, but that ultimately you should feel both happy and supported the majority of the time in any friendship or relationship.
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This series features Widgit symbols.