Learning for Life Clinical Consultant, Claire Birrell, has worked with Learning for Life for over fifteen years, commencing as a therapist and working her way up as a senior staff member in the clinical space. Claire spoke to donors at an event in November last year to keep them abreast of how we continue to provide best-practice therapy and the importance of financial support from donors to ensure our clients receive the highest standard of autism services.
An extract of this speech is below:
“I recently marked my 15 year anniversary at L4Life. When people outside of our community ask me how long I’ve worked here they’re often surprised by that number. They’re surprised I haven’t moved onto something else, they wonder if I get bored, if I’m playing it safe. What I inevitably explain to these inquisitors is that while technically I’ve been at the same L4Life for 15 years, it’s not really the same. There are of course some things that never change.
Our founding principles to provide best-practice therapy to autistic children from families who would not otherwise be able to afford it, to produce research to advocate for ABA therapy, to provide a career path within the ABA field – these all continue to ring true in everything we do.
However, it’s how we do these things that has changed, that continues to evolve and grow year after year – it’s something I’ve always I’ve always admired about L4Life and the reason you’ll likely still find me here in my old age! I would argue though, that in my time at L4Life thus far, it is the last few years that have seen the biggest changes (for the better just to clarify!)
A lot of this has come through our NDIS registration and the doors that have opened for the types of services we can provide and for whom. But even before registration we had begun quite a significant shift in how we run our early intervention programs, including what we prioritise in our teaching, how we teach it, how we approach behaviours of concern, how many hours of therapy per week we recommend and so on. We’ve always been good at individualising our therapy programs – no cookie cutter approaches here!
What we have learnt to do over the past few years though is to ask new questions. Questions like ‘what is the child telling us about how they would like to learn?’ or ‘if this child was able to speak, or to communicate more effectively, would there be a circumstance in which we would allow this potentially problematic behaviour?’
By listening to autistic voices in our community we are continuing to learn more about how a neurodiverse brain might experience the world in ways that a neurotypical brain does not. I believe that we are getting better and better at both asking and answering them.
A huge contributing factor for the development of our skills in this area lies in all of the professional development opportunities the L4Life staff have received in the last couple of years thanks mostly to generous grants and donations. Because of these grants staff have been able to receive cultural and linguistically diverse training, trauma informed care training and attend the ABAtoday conference, adding to our inventory of skills and allowing us to better support our culturally diverse families, identify signs of trauma and provide support to someone who has experienced it and to benchmark our skills with others in the field.”
Thank you Claire for sharing your story.
If you would like to donate to Learning for Life and contribute to the development of knowledge and support in the area of austism services, you can do so on our donations page.
