On Wednesday, Jane Vaughan, Director of Education at the NAS, gave evidence to the Education Select Committee, which is currently holding an inquiry into behaviour. The idea behind the session was for MPs on the Committee to hear from teachers and of organisations that represent children with special educational needs. Representatives of the Special Educational Consortium, I CAN and Young Minds gave evidence too.
You can watch the Select Committee session online. The evidence from the NAS begins at 1 hour and 14 minutes.
During the session, Jane put forward several ideas. Firstly, she said that we should focus more on a child’s learning, and the support they need to learn, rather than on managing a child’s behaviour, because when a child is able to learn, behavioural problems can be avoided.
Jane called upon the committee to think carefully about autism awareness training for all teaching staff, including head teachers and governors. She also said that assessments should be carried out before schools think about excluding a pupil, in order to make sure that their perceived bad behaviour is not due to a special educational need.
During the evidence, Jane gave several examples of when a special educational need was mistaken for bad behaviour. You can watch one of them at 2 hours and 4 minutes into the video.
Hi
ReplyDeleteRe the assertion that 'we should focus more on a child’s learning, and the support they need to learn, rather than on managing a child’s behaviour, because when a child is able to learn, behavioural problems can be avoided' - I think we need to be very specific about what we mean by 'the support they need to learn'.
Developmental psychologists would say that in order for a child to learn they need to be able to use their thinking skills to solve problems and to respond to uncertainty and change....to meet the challenges that we are all constantly presented with in everyday life (including within an educational setting).
What is usually behind behavioural problems (or distressed behaviour) is gaps in the development of adaptive thinking. In order for children to learn, we need to address lagging thinking development.....adaptive thinking = adaptive behaviour.
I would be very interested to know what NAS thinks about the suggestion that adaptive thinking leads to adaptive behaviour and if in agreement, how NAS sees adaptive thinking being developed in children with autism in the education system.
Zoe Thompson
Bright Futures
www.brightfuturesautism.com
I would agree with the above comment about the link between distressed behaviour and deficits in flexible/adaptive thinking. Due to core deficits in autism children do not naturally develop the skills to problem solve,as they do in typical development,and therefore when the only way they know to manage a situation fails they are left feeling frightened and incompetent, leading to a label of 'behaviour problems'. I would agree therefore that a key focus in education should be on the learning, but how we can we best help the children to develop cognitively so they can 'learn to learn' for themselves, so that hopefully each new situation isnt so frightening? I understand that in the United States there are some programmes available which focus on this area, particularly Relationship Development Intervention (Gutstein and Sheely), and would be interested to know the NAS's thoughts on this programme, or on other ways of intervening to develop children in this area?
ReplyDeleteRuth Green
Speech and Langauge Therapist
Thank you both for your comments. I will refer on to Jane and others in our schools for a full response.
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