At Open Avenues we offer professional and practical support and advice for teaching your child or young adult with a learning disability.
Our practitioners can provide 1:1 support for your child, or provide training and guidance to you and your family, to deliver accessible and affordable teaching and behaviour support programmes based on the principles of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) and Positive Behaviour Support (PBS). We are now offering support services remotely, available across the UK and Ireland.
Combined we have 22 years experience working with individuals with learning disabilities, and a wide professional support network of skilled practitioners.
A teaching programme should be based not only on a learner's needs, but also designed around the family and take into account their lifestyle and what is manageable for them.
We specialise in...
- Behaviour support
- Increasing communication
- Life skills (e.g. self-care)
- Social skills
- Academic interventions (reading & comprehension, handwriting, numeracy)
Click here to find out more.
What Is ABA?
ABA practitioners recognise that every person with learning difficulties faces different challenges and has different strengths. A good ABA professional will work hard to engage your child in their learning, so that they are happy and motivated to learn and achieve.
Learning should be a positive experience for every child, which is why ABA principles focus on rewarding success. The ABA approach is flexible; practitioners will draw on your child's interests, motivation, and learning style to adapt their teaching to best suit their needs.
Key skills are broken down and taught in small steps in a repetitive way. We know that it can take many learning opportunities for someone with a learning disability to master a new skill; in ABA sessions, individual targets will be repeated a number of times in order to maximise potential learning. Recording data is important. Therapists will take data on a child's progress or level of support needed. This way, if a particular strategy is not working, it can be identified quickly and adapted to find a way that will be effective.
The end goal of any ABA-based programme is independence. Practitioners will always aim to fade back prompting and environmental supports, so that the skills we teach are functional and useful for the learner within their learning placement and home environment. With ABA therapy, we aim to give our learners the tools they need to succeed on their own.