Secondary School in Lambeth for children on the autism spectrum

[ProjectVangard]

We are a group of parents working with Lambeth and the National Autistic Society to set up a secondary school for children on the autism spectrum. Focus will be on skills for life through active partnership with the community - eg colleges, mainstream schools, charities and local business. If you have an interest, we would love to hear from you.

cansu what teaching methods are used at your ds's school?

I can't quite get my head round how a school can tailor teaching methods to each individual child - surely that would present huge difficulties with resources, for one thing, and probably must entail one teacher per pupil? Is that what is involved?

Totally agree, of course, that ASD is such a massively diverse thing. Which is, partly, why I feel so despondent and rather scornful of the one-size-fits-all TEACCH / "eclectic" approach trotted out as a matter of course in ms school.

Also, I don't really know too much about SSs generally, but am interested to know if the emphasis on 'life skills' is that different?

Yes, maybe it's true that one approach doesn't suit every child with autism.

But what chills my blood is hearing of eclectic approaches being used. I visited one flagship school and they proudly told me that they threw a bit of everything in, even ABA.

Now, whatever approach you feel is best for children with ASD, surely it's best to stick to one methodology and dedicate yourself to executing it properly rather than water everything down and mix everything together in one unholy mess!

Starlight - you do Lambeth a great dis-service. Both groups had to submit a very detailed proposal about their school which included the curriculum, the philosophical approach, the interventions supported, the budget etc etc and we attended several formal interviews. Supporting a free school application is an enormous step for Lambeth who traditionally would not have backed such an approach. However their strategy is to become the first UK co-operative borough and they saw us as being the strongest partners to deliver this with them. Our ethos is that one size does not fit all - lets open a school that puts our children first and caters to their own specific educational and developmental needs....

Beautifully said Cansu - not sure where you are based, but we visited Radlett Lodge last week and it was such a great experience - the NAS isnt perfect but has so much to offer our children.

ProjectVanguard, really well done for getting this project going. The discussions on this thread have probably overshadowed the fact that a new ASD-specific school is being opened in an extremely needy area of London - which is brilliant news

I think many of us, however, just want to know more about the school itself.

You say a school that puts our children first and caters to their own specific educational and developmental needs

But please tell us more about how this school is going to do that? You say you had to submit a detailed plan of the interventions supported - which ones are they? Few of us on this board have much patience any more for wishy-washy statements about 'empowerment' and 'supporting our children' without wanting to delve a little deeper into how this is going to be put into practice in a tangible, measurable way.

Sorry, that probably sounded rather rude - my comment about 'wishy washy statements about empowerment' wasn't directed at you, just generally about the bog-standard provision offered to many of us by local authorities.

And it is a really positive thing that's happening, of course. I suppose I for one just want to know a bit more about what is proposed before going ahead and supporting it.

'Supporting a free school application is an enormous step for Lambeth who traditionally would not have backed such an approach. However their strategy is to become the first UK co-operative borough and they saw us as being the strongest partners to deliver this with them.'

I'm sorry for being cynical about this, but free schools are going to happen anyway. Hearing of a council wanting to become a cooperative would worry me that they are policitally trying to retain control over something that otherwise they risk losing. Not that it is a bad thing to become a cooperative. If done right it can be the best of all worlds, and I'm sure this is your aim. I hope so.

It's just a shame if the same old baggage is brought to the project, and this new school is not seen as an opportunity to deliver the best in evidence-based practice and recent research developments in Autism education.

I have seen Radlett Lodge, and I'm sorry but I was really not impressed. There was too much wishy-washy strategy and independence was defined as independence from social interactions and heavy reliance on visual supports, and above all, I felt expectations were pretty low.

I understand why schools like Radlett Lodge impress, because they take the UK preferred teaching strategy and do it properly and get better results where UK mainstream schools fail to both implement and make it work. But as a nation we should not be looking for better than state mainstream, we should be looking at the best and starting from there.

Star, in fairness, the main difficulty that the NAS schools (and Cambian group, and all the other specialist independents face) is that it is just so exceptionally difficult for dc to get in. So a dc has usually had years of (unintentionally but intensively) reinforced social and academic failure and the usual consequent problem behaviours and withdrawal before a LA will give in and fund Radlett etc.

The absolute key to any good provision (even mainstream for a NT child) is genuinely wanting them to achieve, combined with finding and consistently applying their motivators. ABA is a fantastic way to teach staff to do this, and gives tools for tracking small increments of progress.

Most staff try to be effective already but get disillusioned with setbacks. I'm with moondog, I think the way forward is to get everyone doing structured behavioural approaches very well, and then they will naturally start using ABA type methods more.

There is a big cohort of older professionals who've seen poor quality aba used unethically. No wonder they prefer visual timetables.

Project There are a group of us arranging a parent course to be delivered by an NHS SALT (Moondog)who keeps very up to date in latest research, strategies and interventions and works in a number of state schools encouraging and supporting best practice.

It's likely to run in February. Would you or your parent friends be interested in attending?

The school ds attends uses TEACCH and other standard approached for children with ASD. It has very high staff to child ratio and staff are very well qualified with all the teachers being qualified with the masters in autism diploma. They see their role as teaching ds how to eat, brush his teeth, go to the loo as well as working on communication ALL the time. Everyone who knows ds is amazed by how much he has changed and the progress he has made. I don't know what the provision is like for the more able students though I know there are some children with aspergers and HFA in other classes. It was of course a massive struggle to get ds in this school. I think there is room and a need for many other schools like his alongside schools with different approaches and schools that use methods such as ABA. I am a massive fan of ABA and used it with my dd for three years before she started school. There is a free school proposed near us that is to be for children with HFA. I know that dd who is largely non verbal will not be judged as suitable for this new school even though she is cognitively able. I worry hugely that she doesn't fit in anywhere and I will undoubtedly be faced with a dilemma in years to come when she no longer fits at all in her mainstream primary. I am hugely supportive of any new school which can meet the needs of some of our children. I also think that schools which can take the best from standard approaches and also include methods such as ABA where appropriate will definitely be the way forward.

Bialystock with the life skills part the main difference I saw was that my ds LA ss saw their role as to occupy my ds with activities linked to the national curriculum and saw all his major feeding, toileting and sensory sensitivities as an unfortunate and very sad part of his disability that they could do nothing about. His current school started to plan how they would teach these skills to him from day one and actually saw these problems as being the most important things they needed to teach. Some of these things took a long time to teach but they really never gave up and were convinced they would get there if they continued to work at them. I also think they have much higher expectations of him.

This national curriculum s*ite sends me insane. Shows a complete lack of imagination. Early years staff can turn anything into curriculum goals, why should this skill be restricted to under 5s.

TEACCH looks brilliant to me. I would guess it would work well along with am understanding of behaviouralist teaching strategies. It 'looks' very like Montessori, and good Montessori is applicable right up to high school (sometimes beyond, there's a few schools in the USA and Europe I think).

Communication= English. Handwashing=science and PSHE. Choosing between 2 items=Maths. Visuals=art. Eating with spoon=design and technology

TEACCH has a decent amount of research supporting it as an approach and it was a very important development wrt educating children who were previously thought of as uneducationable. It's just that the research has not kept up to date and TEACCH has not evolved to take account of further developments in autism education. The training still uses slides from the 70s or at least did a couple of years ago before the Cheif Exec left.

The trouble is though that version of adapted TEACHH in UK ms schools and often even in special schools is nothing like the version which the original research supported.

Great post Veronique! So can I check - are both schools still in the running in Lambeth? Maybe I misread but I thought ProjectVangard was saying Lambeth was going with her proposal ? I do hope not, as ABA is at the cutting edge of interventions for autistic kids, as you so vividly describe, whereas TEACCH or 'eclectic' methods simply aren't.

Can you point me to more about scerts please?

Started a new discussion on the background to the free special school applications - my input here was removed!

Surely Gove and co at the Dept of Education decide which free school applications are accepted? Its not a decision for Lambeth to make, Free Schools are free of local control as I understood it
Obviously having a LA agreeing to fund x number of places is crucial - I know the Leeds ABA Free School (Lighthouse) were told they had to get local LAs to confirm they would send children to get it through the last stage.
But as I understand it this is a proposal and either school would need to get enough parental and LA support + pass any other DFE requirements to get it approved.
I assume the assumption is that DFE will not approve two asd schools in the same area.

Agnes Do you have access to recent landmark rulings wrt ABA? I heard a rumour there were a couple.

Star - yes please - do keep us in the loop for February - many thanks!

I'll PM you when we have a date and likely topics.

Oh FFS why was thehublambeth post removed? I skimmed it last night, didn't have time to read it thoroughly, came back to find (as predicted ) pfft - gone. It had nothing AFAICS that broke the guidelines.

A really, really useful and valuable post with information that would be very useful in RL just deleted. Sigh.

Can anyone remind me of the website address that was posted?

bialy she started a separate topic as well, but that's been deleted as well. You could ask her for more info here..The Hub

This is their official website The Hub