Our autism practice is informed by a contemporary understanding of autism following a strengths based approach which may be interpreted through Autism Initiatives’ Five Point Star:
The unique presentation of an individual’s Understanding, Communication, Expectations, Motivation and Sensory Perception enables us to provide detailed support and a personalised curriculum to ensure that our pupils have the ability to make progress in all areas of their development.
Our approach is further supported by recent research by Dr K Silver based on our understanding that autistic people have cognitive differences. Our curriculum therefore promotes opportunities to develop thinking skills through a strength based approach, thus enabling each pupil to develop ‘their own’ skills and strategies that they can understand and use to support them into adult life.
This includes and acknowledges the sensory world and the environment, both interpersonal and physical, and its impact on learners to develop communicative and functional skills, so that they may understand and influence the environments around them. It also explores personal wellbeing by supporting mental health and behaviour, to enable a young person to have the skills and strategies to reflect on, develop and use their own thinking to enable them to make progress.
The five point star forms the basis of our autism practice and thinking.
- Awareness of differences in thinking:
As practitioners we aim to understand each individual person’s thinking and to work with this as our starting point for our approaches to each person.
We recognise that:
- There are thinking differences (cognitive differences) associated with autism.
- We understand that as a result of these differences, people may experience and respond to the world differently
- We recognise that differences in thinking mean that strategies that work for some people may be less effective for others
- We aim to empower people to learn their ‘own ways’ of doing things (own strategies) based on what people already know and do, which match with their own existing ways of thinking. We do not expect our pupils to learn to use strategies that may not work well for them.
- When thinking about differences in thinking, we understand that there are also differences and strengths and abilities relating to memory.
- We understand that there are differences in use of communication and understanding of communication and we change the way we communicate in response to these.
- We recognise that there are differences in sensory experiences and we understand how these may impact in each young person and work with these
- We use our 5 point star approach and try to understand the perspective of each individual person, which may well be different to our own
- We understand the wide spectrum of autism, that is, we recognise that each autistic person is different and so we take a different approach to each person.
- We recognise that what we do and what we say and how we are, may have a positive and negative impact on each young person. We are aware of ourselves
- We have an aspirational culture, focusing on strengths and abilities associated with autism, while acknowledging things that may be difficult for pupils. We think about what is important to each person and how we can prepare each young person to enjoy a good quality of life as an autistic adult
We offer an inclusive curriculum which ensures equality of opportunity
