Independent living outcomes

As your young person with SEND is preparing for adult life, they should learn to make decisions and express their preferences.

You should consider how their choices could lead to, or influence, future outcomes around moving out of the family home and living independently. 

The following themes are ideas of possible outcomes that might help your young person. Some may not be relevant. Others may take a long time to reach, requiring other things to be learnt first:

• Sleeping
• Organisation
• Safety
• Meal planning
• Kitchen clean-up
• Personal hygiene
• Household upkeep
• Laundry
• Finance
• Mobility/ community
• Essential social skills
• Self-advocacy

Helping your young person to decide which outcomes are important to them, takes time and practice. It can require flexibility if your young person is non-verbal. However, your young person could draw pictures, make playdoh models or record things to capture their decisions. Watch this video from Norfolk Portage Service. It has ideas for supporting you child or young person’s communication.

You could use something like an  independence skills checker (pdf) (PDF) [162KB] to record which outcomes are being looked at.