Putting Social Skills onto the Curriculum

Oak Lodge School

Oak Lodge is a secondary special school for children with a moderate learning disability in Hampshire. It has a specialist unit for children with autism and also has specialist status for the arts. It has around 150 children in classes of around ten. As is often the case, the children all have varying degrees of needs in social skills and would ideally all benefit from input.

Our aim is that Oak Lodge School will become a centre of excellence in developing social skills, self esteem and friendship skills.

In order to achieve this we needed to put together a long term and short term plan that was both realistic but radical!

Our long term plan

• All Year 7 children will have one social skills lesson a week to develop their self and other awareness and their self esteem. In the first term, initial baseline assessments will also be completed using the Talkabout assessment.
• All Year 8 children will have one social skills lesson a week to develop their basic social skills - body language, the way we talk and conversational skills. They will then be reassessed at the end of the year and from this, children will be identified for further targeted work.
• In years 9 - 11 children with specific difficulties in social skills, self esteem and/or friendship skills will be seen within groups for targeted work on these areas.

How do we get there?

1. Staff training
   The first step is often staff training and at Oak Lodge School, the Headteacher identified five LSA's who would initially help me to get social skills groups started, and one of whom would be my main link person. I spent two afternoons training them in the hierarchical approach and to the Talkabout materials.
   
   These LSA's were also timetabled to run groups with me last summer to build up confidence in running social skills groups prior to the autumn term. These five people are key to making the groups work as they can then prepare the resources and lead the groups alongside the teachers.
   
   This also means that gradually, all staff will receive training through being involved in the groups.
   
   
2. An easy and practical social skills resource
   Schools are hectic, busy places and we knew that if this was going to work, we needed to make it as easy as possible.
   
   One of the LSA's was given some non-contact time to help me put together a resource of activities for the groups. These activities are based on the Talkabout resources but with additional materials gathered into clear plastic wallets so that the person running the group can easily find the materials needed for a specific game. So, for example, the self awareness activity 'What do people look like?' requires symbols of different physical attributes and these were produced and placed in a wallet and labelled S1. These are all kept in a resource cupboard in clear boxes in the Speech and Language Therapy room.
   
   
3. An easy system to collect information on the groups
   We wanted to keep notes on the groups, but we wanted to devise a system that was quick to use. We created files for each year and then sheets for each group that included the activities and names of the children and then a code to mark how they coped with each activity.
   
   This was basic but seems to be effective:
   D = did not attend;
   X = did not achieve/found the task difficult;
   Y = skill emerging/needed some help with the task;
   and Z = skill present/did not need help.
   
   We also included a comments section to allow for specific notes on the session.
   
   
4. A short term plan!
   Currently we need to run basic social skills groups for a lot of the children in the school as they obviously have not benefited from this over recent years.
   
   So, we decided to do a whole school approach for two years. This will mean that this year, all children receive one lesson a week in self awareness and self esteem. Next year, the year 7 children will receive a year of self and other awareness and all the other children will receive a lesson in basic social skills; body language, the way we talk and conversational skills.
   
   We will then be able to put our long term plan into action for real!
   
   
5. One lesson a week identified within the timetable for social skills with a trained LSA to support the teacher
   This was obviously something that I left to the Headteacher and deputy to organise and so far this is going well!
   
   
6. A compromise…
   In order to make this work, there had to be a small compromise. I like (and advocate), that social skills groups are best run with six to eight children and two facilitators.
   
   The two facilitators were not a problem, but the group size was a problem. We were able to split Year 7 into smaller groups of seven and eight, but most lessons are time tabled to run as a class and this mostly means groups of up to ten.
   
   This can be difficult but is not impossible with careful planning.
   
   
7. And finally, getting the parents on board
   Parents were invited into school at the beginning of September to hear about the social skills work at the school and to talk to me about their children. In addition, they were all sent simplified assessments to complete on their child so that we have a baseline assessment from the parental view as well as our own assessment.

So, hopefully that has given you some idea on how we approached putting social skills onto the curriculum.

In the next issue, I thought I would break down the social skills package so that you can see exactly what planning for a year of self awareness and self esteem work might look like.

Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz

 

Alex Kelly is the author of Speechmark's best selling Talkabout series.

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