This PD will equip you with the foundations of supporting a young person with learning lifeskills.

Developing lifeskills is an important developmental task for young people. As practitioners, we support young people in becoming independent, gaining self-confidence, feeling empowered and in control of their own lives.

This session will equip you with this important task by providing the foundations of supporting a young person with learning lifeskills.

We focus on young people with ID, ASD, Learning Disabilities (and others with much of the content also applicable to children). The presentation will focus on the basics – to lay the foundation of your clinical reasoning and decision making.

The session is appropriate to whether you are new to this area or want to refresh yourself and gain new insights and ideas. Our best practice-based content has been designed from our combined experiences: from a personal, parent perspective, as occupational therapists and also as researcher.

In this session we cover:

• Introduction (including the importance of lifeskills training for a young person)

• Foundational principles in working with this unique age group in order to be effective

• Foundational learning principles

• Getting to know your client well, (including commonly used assessment tools and non-verbal clients)

• Goal-setting and developing an agreement

• Task analysis (revising occupational performance analyses and tuning in your observation skills)

• Skills training (and teaching principles and methods, challenges, tips on keeping a client motivated, tools and strategies)

• Evaluation of intervention