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Developing early communication skills
Therapy Assistant Pilot Project
The ACT Government Budget for 2011-12 includes funding for Therapy ACT to conduct a twelve month pilot project examining the effectiveness of a Therapy Assistant model in ACT schools. Funding is available for 4 full time Therapy Assistants and two Health Professional positions. This pilot follows the trial of a therapy assistant position at Malkara School in 2010.
Therapy Assistants will work in schools implementing therapy programs developed by physiotherapists, speech pathologists and occupational therapists in consultation with teachers. Depending on the needs of the individual children and the classroom they may work in the classroom or with individual or small groups of children out of the classroom. Therapy assistants will be able to support the practice of new skills for individual children so that these skills can be generalised to the school setting and maintained.
The pilot project aims to trial therapy assistants in a range of settings including mainstream classes, Learning Support Units, Learning Support Units (Autism specific), and specialist schools. One school nominated by Catholic Education will also be included in the pilot. A maximum of 8 pilot sites will be selected by Therapy ACT in consultation with the Education Directorate (Disability Education and School Principals) and the Catholic Education Office.
A project steering group including representatives from the selected schools, Disability Education, Parent representatives and Senior Professionals from Therapy ACT will be established to oversight the project. The project will include an on-going evaluation component with reporting in December 2011 and July 2012.
Information on the project will be provided to the Disability Education Reference Group who will be asked to provide their input into the project.
Recruitment action to select a Team Leader and the Therapy Assistants has commenced. It is expected that the Team Leader will commence in June and the Therapy Assistants in July. Therapy Assistants will be trained during July and commence work in schools in the second week of Term 3.
Updated Information will be available on the Therapy ACT website as the project develops http://www.dhcs.act.gov.au/therapyact. For further information please contact: Senior Manager Therapy ACT on 6205 1277 or TherapyACT@act.gov.au.
Information Sheet No 4 [HTML] [PDF 145KB] [RTF 867KB]
Information Sheet No 3 [HTML] [PDF 143KB] [RTF 868KB]
