Learning For Life: What are others saying?
“Having discussions about these topics is hard for any parent but when your child has additional needs, it’s even more difficult and there is so little out there to help you,” says Sheryl.
Jake attended a mainstream primary school and was included in the RSE curriculum there, but Sheryl realised some of the social behaviours his peers just picked up, Jake needed to be taught much more deliberately.
“We had an incident at primary school where Jake did something inappropriate because it got a laugh. He essentially got into trouble because we hadn’t taught him about the boundaries in that specific context,” she says.
Currently Jake attends a specialist secondary school, and Sheryl explains how it’s even more important that he is actively taught key social behaviours.
“As Jake has become a teenager, we have found that inclusive social opportunities have been fewer and friendship groups have been harder to form. He used to do clubs and activities with his sister and school friends and even did a week-long residential school trip to Paris. This means that now Jake experiences fewer everyday social situations with mainstream peers, who are good role models to learn social and friendship skills with. If you don’t have as many everyday opportunities to learn important social skills as part of growing up, then a teaching package like this is invaluable.
“Doing ‘Growing Up and Keeping Safe’ with him has been absolutely brilliant because it proves he can get the concepts, but they need to be delivered in the right way. Jake like many individuals with Down’s syndrome, is a very visual learner, so the videos and picture resources work really well for him, with the focus on keywords and concepts, it seems to have really clicked with him.
“The pace and repetition of the resources are key for him too. They are small bite-size chunks which work really well as he needs to go over the content many times to embed the learning, and this is ideal as we can keep revisiting the topics when we need to go over something again”.
Sheryl is looking forward to more resources becoming available, “The Learning for Life project is really exciting for us because we want Jake to have the right understanding to go through life. What does he need to know for inclusion in society? I would love to see the RSE topics expanded further and look at how we discuss more complex issues with him such as sexuality and gender identity. How do we support him through the difficult journey of understanding some of these wider topics? Young people with Down’s syndrome are also going to be having their own personal questions about these topics as they grow up, so we need them to be included in the conversation. Anything that can help us have these discussions is so welcome”.
Jake has certainly reacted very positively to the ‘Growing Up and Keeping Safe’ series, “I learned about my body and keeping safe, about public and private. It’s good,” he says.
What is ‘Learning For Life’ and how can it support the young person I support?
Learning For Life is a project that delivers short videos, delivered directly to young people covering particular areas of the wider relationship and sex education curriculum. Each video has an accompanying student resource pack and visual resources to support teaching and learning.
The first series is ‘Growing Up and Keeping Safe’ which explores areas of privacy, appropriate behaviour, and private body parts. It addresses some key areas of the curriculum that are often overlooked and may need more explicit teaching for our young people.
The next series is in production and the aim is to keep building content until there is a bank of videos covering a wide range of topics within the RSE curriculum, including sexuality, puberty, difference and much more.