3 Popular Strategies to Support Autism in the Classroom
Today marks the start of World Autism Acceptance Week. Schools across the country will spend the next seven days celebrating their pupils and staff on the spectrum. At Teaching Personnel, we hope that all the week's events, activities and fundraisers will expand people's understanding of both the challenges and the many joys that constitute life with ASD.
The world can sometimes seem like a scary and disheartening place for children with autism. When human communication feels like a strange game whose rules you can’t always grasp, even the most innocuous of everyday scenarios can become distressing and disorientating. That’s why educators and researchers have devised a great number of strategies for supporting autism in the classroom.
Special Needs Education is such a rich field of study that it would take hours to explore all these strategies and their many acronyms and abbreviations. Instead, let’s take a closer look at three of the most commonly-used strategies in UK classrooms for supporting autistic students: SCERTS, SPELL and TEACCH, and how schools are putting them into practice.
What is the SCERTS model?
SCERTS is a model designed to help teachers, families, therapists, and anyone else with a duty of care to an autistic child. It is an acronym that refers to the model’s three core planks, as outlined on the official SCERTS website.
- SC (Social communication) - the development of spontaneous, functional communication, emotional expression, and secure and trusting relationships with children and adults
- ER (Emotional Regulation) - the development of the ability to maintain a well-regulated emotional state to cope with everyday stress, and to be most available for learning and interacting
- TS (Transactional Support) - the development and implementation of supports to help partners respond to the child’s needs and interests, modify and adapt the environment, and provide tools to enhance learning (e.g., picture communication, written schedules, and sensory supports). Specific plans are also developed to provide educational and emotional support to families, and to foster teamwork among professionals.
SCERTS is conceived as a ‘lifespan’ model that allows appropriate elements of support to be applied consistently over time. This ambition and scope means that SCERTS can readily integrate elements of other frameworks and models, including those we will explore in this piece.
As a toolbox for structuring collaboration within support teams, SCERTS is the gold standard.
How schools are putting SCERTS into place
A large number of both mainstream and special schools across the UK employ SCERTS as a guiding principle.
At Hill Top School in Gateshead, teachers and parents work as a team with Speech and Language Therapists to assess children and assign personalised goals using the SCERTS framework. These targets are reviewed at six-month intervals.
Just across the Tyne in Newcastle, Benton Dene School turns these plans into activities that are “motivating and appropriate to the child’s interests and needs”, delivered in small groups, one-to-one or as “seemingly incidental” tasks occurring throughout the school day.
Queensmill School in West London are evangelists for SCERTS, naming it the model that “most closely aligns with our fundamental ethos”. Beyond simply implementing the model internally, the school has “frequently hosted training events” to share the benefits of SCERTS with “as wide an audience as possible”.
What is the SPELL model?
The SPELL model is the National Autistic Society’s in-house framework for responding to the individual needs of people on the spectrum.
Like SCERTS, this framework’s acronym represents its five core principles that, as the NAS writes, “have been identified as vital elements of best practice when working with autistic people”. These are:
Structure
Strong and dependable structures are vital in making life comfortable, safer and more autonomous for people with autism. This means that anyone working with autistic children should seek to embed predictable patterns and stable environments in their lives.
Positive (approaches and expectations)
Expectations for achievements should be high yet realistic. Those working to support children with ASD should strive to “establish and reinforce self-confidence and self-esteem” through assessments that take into view the individual’s specific barriers. This will allow children who often prefer the comfort of familiar or repetitive experiences to broaden their horizons with less anxiety.
Empathy
Anybody who works with autistic people needs to try and see the world from their standpoint. This means making an effort to develop an understanding of what improves and what reduces that individual’s quality of life. This will help develop crucial bonds of trust.
Low arousal
The routine hubbub of day-to-day life can be severely sensorily overloading for people with autism. This is why learning environments must be made as uncluttered, calm and unobtrusively lit as possible to maintain a low and productive level of sensory arousal. Appropriate environmental management is a basic tenet of inclusive practice and accessibility.
Links
Strong bonds of advocacy between the autistic individual, their families, teachers, support workers and other members of a support network are central to the SPELL model. Links of collaboration and communication will, the NAS report,“reduce the risk of misunderstanding, confusion or […] fragmented, piecemeal approaches”.
How schools are putting SPELL into practice
Thanks, in part, to its origins within the National Autistic Society, the SPELL model is widely used in both special and mainstream UK schools.
SAFE put SPELL front-and-centre of their efforts to support those pupils. Staff are given yearly training in its concepts and recommendations, while senior leaders and managers refer to SPELL when making high-level decisions.
At the nearby Marlborough School in Sidcup, senior leaders and teachers build SPELL guidelines into the fabric of daily school life. This work spans a range of tactics, from using colour coding books by subject to provide a structured baseline for independent study and using plain worksheets without unnecessary illustrations to liaising with Occupational Therapists and Educational Psychologists.
SPELL’s applicability to so many areas of schooling is one of its strengths as a strategy for supporting students with autism.
What is the TEACCH framework?
The TEACCH framework (Teaching and Education of Autistic and related Communication-Handicapped Children) was developed by American researchers in the 1960s at the University of North Carolina.
TEACCH involves five core values for everyone engaged.
Teaching
Sharing knowledge on autism and increasing the skill level of other practitioners and professionals.
Expanding
Increasing one’s own knowledge in order to provider higher-quality services to autistic people and their families.
Appreciating
Gaining an understanding of the existence of autism as a ‘culture’
Collaborating and Cooperating
Working productively with colleagues, other professionals, autistic people and their families.
Holistic
Adopting a holistic approach and a perspective that encompasses the individual, their family and their community.
These five values are realised through tactics that should feel quite familiar by now.
- Physical structure – organising the individual’s physical environment with clear physical boundaries.
- Consistent schedules – giving children dependable routines in how they structure their day and how their learning works.
- Establishing expectations – a clear and realistic set of expectations will help caregivers structure the support that children receive.
- Using visually-based clues – autistic people often find visual learning much more intuitive than verbal methods.
How schools are putting TEACCH into practice
Over the last few decades, TEACCH has crossed the Atlantic and found a foothold in UK schools.
At Oaklands School in Hounslow, staff adhere to the TEACCH method through a highly individualised and granular set of practices. Teachers carefully designate different teaching areas for different functions, cover windows or removing distractions to prevent overstimulation and redesign learning materials in order to maximise their visual clarity.
At Henry Tyndale School in Hampshire, teachers create self-contained activities called TEACCH tasks for each child to complete independently. These tasks will be tailored to every child’s individual interests and learning abilities.
How your school can implement these strategies too
As the UK’s largest educational recruitment agency, Teaching Personnel helps thousands of primary, secondary and special schools across the country support their autistic and SEN pupils.
We provide these schools with teaching and support staff trained in a variety of common strategies. All our educators have access to a rich range of specialist CPD training courses, including our National Autistic Society-accredited Understanding Autism module.
For advice on how your school can integrate practices like SCERTS, SPELL and TEACCH into classroom life and make education easier for your autistic pupils, get in touch today.
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