Families are the most important continuing relationship in the lives of people with a disability. Families spend more time with the person than anyone else in most cases, and are there as a backup if things go wrong.
As a result, parents need to be the senior partners in decisions surrounding their children under 18, and significant contributors to decisions around their older children with a disability. Similarly, siblings can make very important contributions towards ensuring a good life for their brother or sister. While human service staff come and go throughout a person’s life, families are there for the whole lifetime in most cases. As such, the relationships with family members need to be supported and not overridden by ideologies of ‘client choice’ without deep considerations of the implications.
Families can feel lost and unsure about what direction is best. Inclusion or segregated education? What should I be teaching at home? What should we be doing about planning for the future? What can we do when things go wrong? Include has a range of ways that we can assist families.
Psychology type services.
We can assist with: building skills through analysing tasks and systematic teaching. This can be in self-help skills, school preparation skills and work skills and assisting with difficult behaviour at home or in the society.
- Attending school meetings with families to negotiate partnerships and positive approaches.
- Writing reports for agencies or schools. Note that we do not administer IQ or other ability tests due to their history of limiting expectations and facilitating segregation. We do carry out skills based testing such as reading assessments, environmental assessments and clinically based assessments.
- Assistance with difficult behaviour. For more information click here.
To read is a fundamental skill in our society but if a child doesn’t learn to read by the end of year 3 they are normally on their own. From year 3 children ‘read to learn’ so if they cant’t read it becomes a major barrier to learning. However we have shown with hundreds of children over 20 years in mainstream high schools and the family home, children with and without disabilities can learn to read from as young as age 2 if the appropriate approach and teaching materials are used. We provide a service of establishing a child on the reading program and build the skills and confidence of the parent or tutor so they can continue on their own. We then provide the replacement teacher materials and readers on a monthly rental basis plus costs of the non-re-usable workbooks. In several research studies we have conducted, learning rates of an average of three reading grades in one academic year are regularly achieved with regular consistent teaching. The teaching can be conducted interstate through the use of skype sessions. Contact us for details and costs as well as families to contact who are on the program.
Parents of children with disability are systematically taught by society to prepare for their child having a lesser, segregated life. This is almost inevitable unless families have a clear vision for their child and a systematically designed plan for making their ideal life a reality. We can help families work through this planning and provide a strong basis for setting out what they want in their plan for NDIS where applicable. For more information click here.
Despite having the Disability Discimination Act 1992 and the Disability Education Standards 2005, it is very common for families to experience gatekeeping when they try for inclusive education or find that their child is discriminated against, restrained or treated badly at school. We can sometimes help in those situations by providing advice or attending school meetings. This is normally done ‘pro bono’ unless it becomes extensive whereupon a manageable arrangement is made.
A reality for many children with disability is that they are low on skills compared to their peers. These can be self help skills, social skills or academic skills. However, this doesn’t mean that they cannot learn those skills or that it necessarily takes a lot of time. However, it often means that we have to be more systematic in our teaching and break tasks down into manageable ‘chunks’ so the child can learn. We can help with that, with skills often learned rapidly when there has been little previous progress.