Highfield Centre

Why Choose A Centre-based Approach?

Benefits For The Parents

  • Centre will recruit staff.
  • Parents can be sure that high quality people will be delivering teaching to their child.
  • The Centre can deliver 40 hours of teaching per week over 49 weeks of the year.
  • Parents will receive help in selecting an appropriate school for their child.
  • Parent training will take place on a regular basis.
  • The Centre will develop relationships with professionals who will visit the Centre on a regular basis. For example, professionals from counselling services, speech and language services and educational psychology services will be regular visitors.
  • Parents will have time for themselves or to devote to siblings while the child is at the Centre.
  • A reduction in the stresses some families experience, and hopefully more time and energy to successfully implement behaviour management strategies at home and then generalise the skills that their child has learned during the day.
  • The costs to the family of running a programme will be considerably reduced.
  • The stress of obtaining funding will be reduced.

Benefits For The Children

  • FUN.
  • Quality controlled teaching.
  • Constant supervision and evaluation of his or her individual programme.
  • Advantages that will come from the staff being able to "double up" during sessions.
  • Generalisation of the skills being taught can be built into the programmes of the staff that the child encounters throughout the day.
  • Children will be able to interact with their peers in a variety of social settings.
  • Children will be able to learn through group play and observational learning.
  • The whole of the Centre environment is geared towards the children and therefore they will not be restricted to one area, as is often the case within a home environment.
  • Children will be able to practise classroom skills before being introduced into mainstream classroom situations.
  • Children can be taught to develop relationships within the community to aid their ability to integrate.
  • Children will have supervised lunchtimes.