We work with the person not the label!
Alison Knowles
ollieandhissuperpowers.com?? Award-winning creator of the Ollie Therapeutic Model - transforming emotional wellbeing.
Yesterday I had the honour of working with the teachers and children at Oakfields house school in Lancaster - A special needs school/ AN awesome one - the teachers are truly earth angels!
Well my head is spinning and I did not sleep much after yesterday - the question has been do we need a special arm of Ollie for special needs schools …. the answer - no!
The kids I met yesterday are more up against than some of the kids we work with - so are their parents.. in some cases, a lot more... but all that means from my prospective is we need to working with them... some language changes, some slightly different approaches and I spent the night thinking through what that would look like... I realised - it looks like the Ollie model because we change our approach and tool kit for every child and parent anyway!
But I also know - foster care adoption and special needs is often over looked because it needs a very individual approach..... Ollie is an individual approach!
We don't need to be experts in the day to day stuff of special needs - any more than we need to be experts at maths and English in main stream schools to work with teachers!
We need to support the teachers parents and kids by giving them the ollie tool kit because they ae doing a great job, but a few new tools never goes a miss! Ollie doesn't work with the label he works with the person.