VideoProfiling is a way of sharing information about children, young people and adults with Special Needs to enable them to generalise their skills quickly across lots of different settings.

It’s really easy. Choose something that you want to share with your child’s school, upload a video and invite their teachers, Speech and Language Therapists and other professional to your private network so they know how to work with your child more effectively. Schools can upload videos of the things your child is doing at school to make it easier for you to support and teach them at home.

Parents, teachers, Speech and Language Therapists, ABA consultants, Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists… in fact anyone who lives or works with a child, young person or adult with special needs and wants to help them learn new skills across new settings and with new people and evidence the achievements they’re making.

Sometimes it can be difficult for parents to implement the programmes that professionals are setting up to help children, young people and adults achieve new things. Creating a video profile enables everyone to see the best way of supporting that person and get the strategies right the first time and every time!

It’s easy! Click on the image and you’ll go straight through to our start up page… you can join as a parent or as someone who supports someone with a learning difficulty. We’ll activate your account within 24 hours. Have fun!

There’s something I want you to imagine, and you’re going to need a pen and paper to do it… Got one? Good! Let’s start…

Imagine you’re at a dinner party with 6 strangers. They’re all talking about astrophysics… not one of your favourite topics of conversation. You’re trying your best to join in but every time you do you’re met with blank expressions, rolling eyes and groans. Every now and then they switch languages and start speaking Chinese – a question comes your way and although you want to answer them you don’t understand what they’re saying, you can’t reply and feel embarrassed.

Here’s where the pen and paper come in. Write down your thoughts to the following questions…

• What do you think about your fellow diners?

• How many conversations are you likely to start?

• How confident are you feeling and how does your body language reflect this?

• Did you like the dinner party and more importantly, would you come back if you were invited?

Ok, so you go to a second dinner party. This time it’s with your friends. As you walk through the door a cheer goes up and everyone gives you a hug. You sit down, everyone turns to face you and immediately start listening to what you say. They ask questions about all of your favourite conversational topics, they laugh at your jokes and seem really glad that you’re here.

Think about those questions again and write down your thoughts…

I’m guessing, but I would think that you preferred the second dinner party!

It’s a blunt analogy but I wanted to think about how our communication skills can be affected by the people around us.  At the second dinner party I imagine you felt more relaxed, started up conversations more frequently, felt ‘more connected with the people around you, talked for longer… More importantly you saw those people as people you wanted to communicate with and, because of this, you used your communication skills to their maximum potential.

For children and adults who have communication impairment what may be perceived as a ‘reluctance‘ to interact may actually be a difficulty ‘connecting’ with those around them.  If their interaction style isn’t compatible with then it is up to adult to adapt their interaction style so communication can take place.

The Hanen programme, Intensive Interaction,  Son Rise,  FloorTime, SCERTS and RDI all acknowledge the importance of being a ‘responsive communicative partner and how important it is for us to think about our communicative behaviour when interacting with children and adults with communication difficulties. The Every Child a Talker, scheme introduced this idea in mainstream schools and noted the positive changes in a child’s communication skills when adults adapted their interaction skills to suit theirs. A book released last year, Promoting Social Interaction for Individuals with Communication Impairments, talked about the positive impact of a being a responsive communicative partner for adult’s with althiemers, children with Autism, young people with congenital deaf blindness, Romanian orphans… The list goes on.

Bear with me, I’m getting to the point! We don’t want to fall into a trap of thinking children and young people can’t have meaningful interactions with the people around them because of their communication impairment.  Both communication partners need to take responsibility for a positive interaction and this means looking at how you are seen as a communicative partner… In essence ask yourself this question… do your communicative partners see you as the first dinner party or the second dinner party?!

And remember to share the strategies you use, the games that you play with other people so they can have as much fun too…

VideoProfiling Team

There’s never been a point in history where a government has not made contentious discussions regarding the structuring of public services – at the end of the day that’s what governments do! However, the UK is facing unprecedented budget cuts across all public services that will impact not just the way they work with families who have children with special needs now, but potentially may change the nature by which families access public services in the long term too.

Campaigning, awareness raising and monitoring the impact of these budget cuts will be essential to make sure that those who are most vulnerable don’t ‘slip through the net’. In the meantime however, services will need to look at how they are structured to make sure that they are working efficiently to maximize positive outcomes for the families they work with.

Britain’s National Health Service is encouraging some services to equip their service users with the skills and resources to manage their own conditions on a day-to-day basis, thus reducing demand on their stretched resources. Pre-dating David Cameron’s flagship concept ‘Big Society’ by 11 years The Expert Patients Programme was initiated to “give people the confidence to take more responsibility and self-manage their health, while encouraging them to work collaboratively with health and social care professionals” The outcome of this initiative was, that by involving patients in their care plans, they had better self management skills, had better communication with professionals and were more confident in taking control over their care plans. A comprehensive review of the ‘story so far’ can be read in the Self Care Reduces Cost and Improves Health – The Evidence document, downloaded from the Expert Patients website.

Let’s extend this idea to encompass families who have family members with special educational needs for a moment. After all, pupils only spend a fraction of their time at school, and it is down to those who they live with to make potentially stressful decisions regarding the day-to-day management of their communication difficulties.  Should those who are supporting children and adults within educational settings looking at an ‘Expert Parents’ programme to equip parents with the skills they need to support the communication and learning challenges their family members face?

An existing model that is making positive steps towards achieving a higher degree of involvement from parents in prioritising targets and identifying subsequent support strategies is the SCERTS model. Although it isn’t widespread in the UK it is gaining more momentum in the USA and NZ and a 3 million dollar study has recently been awarded to Florida State University to study its effectiveness across 40 schools.

The future is uncertain however one thing we can be sure of is that there will be an expectation from parents that services continue improving, positive outcomes are maintained and support for them and their families is accessible. It is often quoted that innovation increases during times of crisis and I’m confident that that services to families, and families themselves, over the next few years will react to funding changes in positive and resourceful ways to enable those who are most vulnerable within our society to ensure sure their needs continue to be met.

VP Team

Do people use Letters and Sounds: Principals and Practice of High Quality Phonics anymore, the previous government’s literacy strategy? We liked it but it never seemed to get the exposure it deserved…?

The videos that accompanied the strategies resource pack especially were very inspiring – a fun, engaging collection of activities to introduce ways to teach listening and literacy skills. A favourite of ours were the  ‘listening walks’, an activity designed to increase children’s awareness of environmental sounds where everybody got to wear massive comedy ears! Very Monty Python-esque!

Click on the ears to get resources!

If we were ever looking for opportunities for pupils using PECS at Phase V! (Using “I hear” to comment on sounds) to get involved with curricular activities then literacy sessions were a great place to start.

As the class were listening to environmental sounds, different instruments and body sounds (aspects 1, 2 and 3) pupils using PECS were able to show their class mates how good they were at using symbols to comment on the things they could hear.

VP Team

A recent research study carried out by Brighton based psychologist and quoted extensively in the Guardian discusses how children’s behaviour and the relationships they have with their parents can be effected by factors such as having a poorly organised or chaotic home environment. This is in addition to already known factors such as a lack of routines or insufficient space for the people who are using it.

As professionals who are used to making adaptations to the environment when setting up communication and learning programmes for children with Autism this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. These are very much the same factors within a learning environment that can impact negatively on communication and learning and those who live and work with children and adults with Autism have been applying the principals promoted by TEACCH successfully for years. These principals start with the premise that the environment needs to be a structured in a way that matches a persons learning style in order to maximize their potential to support communication and develop independent learning and living.

I think what’s interesting about this is that now that we’re beginning to understand that ‘neuro-typical’ children seem to be affected by the same environmental demands as those with Autism it seems as though the gap between ‘Autistic’ and ‘Non-Autistic’ people might not be as great as we thought.