All individuals with Autism are entitled to a good education and a quality of life.
How we at Swalcliffe Park go about taking a QoL approach to help improving quality of life outcomes for our students and their families.
The QoL framework
In recent years, researchers from across the world have been emphasising the importance of improved Quality of Life as a meaningful outcome for young people with a variety of medical and developmental conditions and their families. This is of particular importance for those with autism, research has shown that the QoL of autistic adults is lower than in the general population, and that families of autistic children have the poorest QoL of all SEND groups.
However, despite all this research there is a lack of practical, evidence-based solutions for schools and colleges to use in their daily practice. This is why we have developed a ‘Quality of Life’ approach.
We call this approach our QoL Framework, which was designed to work in a specialist school but can also be adapted to suit a range of settings e.g. mainstream schools, colleges and Children’s Homes.
Hearing student and family voice
All about me: All about us
The starting point for helping our students to “achieve great things” is getting a sense of who they are, what they enjoy doing and who they want to be. This involves finding out what makes them happy now, and about their
hopes and aspirations for the future.
So, we ask them about their hobbies and interests and where they feel their strengths lie. We also need to know about their difficulties and struggles so that we can help them enjoy life as much as possible in the present, and prepare
them for the lives they want to lead in the future.
QoL is highly personal, multi-dimensional and dynamic, so it is very important that we enquire about it regularly. We do this by asking students how things are going in their lives on a termly basis, using the Quality of Life in Autism (QoLA) questionnaire.
This gives students a regular opportunity to think about and talk about how they feel life is going, in areas such as their relationships, feelings and personal circumstances. By sharing this information, each
student is giving us his personal perspective on what is going well in his life and, conversely, what is not. In other words, it helps us to understand what each student sees as the main barriers to the QoL that he is seeking…
whatever that may look like for him.
Our approach involves working closely with families. We all know that student lives are integrated within and influence family lives. We also recognise that in order to “live full and happy lives”, some families will need
direct support and guidance. This makes it essential for us to know how autism affects each family’s quality of life.
Therefore, just as we ask students to complete a termly QoLA survey, we ask families to do the same. This allows families to tell us how things are going at home including any difficult issues they are facing
as well as aspirations they have to improve QoL. We can then talk to them about the issues they have raised to see how we can best support them.
The Keyworker Role
At Swalcliffe Park School, we have developed the role of keyworker to be a critical piece of the QoL framework.
All students and families are allocated a keyworker who will support them throughout their journey through school and who will be their named contact person for the majority of home-school communication.
We believe keyworking is such an important role that we allocate dedicated time to it, including a weekly timetabled slot during the school day.
Keyworkers use the QoL information from individual students and their families to follow up on issues within the scope of their role, to pass on information to other members of staff, to seek advice from specialists on the school team, and to contribute to the review of the individual student’s EHCP outcomes.
We also analyse the responses from the collective student group to inform how we work at a whole school level, for example to plan therapeutic or curriculum themes and to review school organisation and structure.
In addition, analysis of the collective family responses is used to plan and deliver training sessions for families and to develop additional services and provide information to address their concerns.
The SPS Quality of Life Framework:
Practical steps for Implementation
The diagram below illustrates the framework we have developed and shows parallel processes for supporting students and their families. The framework highlights the importance of key-workers as critical players and so the training, development and best practice sharing around this aspect of our work is embedded within our INSET planning and organisational evolution.
