Our service uses the Curriculum Framework for Children and Young People with Vision Impairment (CFVI). It is national framework that has been developed to support children and young people with vision impairment access an appropriate and equitable education alongside existing curriculums.
The framework presents outcomes within 11 areas:
- Facilitating an Inclusive World.
- Sensory Development.
- Communication.
- Literacy.
- Habilitation: Orientation and Mobility.
- Habilitation: Independent Living Skills.
- Accessing information.
- Technology.
- Health: Social, Emotional, Mental and Physical Wellbeing.
- Social, Sports and Leisure.
- Preparing for Adulthood.
It provides a vocabulary to be used by children and young people, their families and professionals in the UK who work with them. A shared vocabulary supports both better communication and purpose.
Underpinning this specialist framework is the ‘access to learning-learning to access’ model (McLinden et al, 2021; McLinden et al, 2016; Douglas et al, 2019). This model is rooted in the belief that specialist support for children and young people with vision impairment should focus on two key outcomes as a route to social inclusion:
- Access to learning: Ensuring all children and young people have fair and optimised access to education.
- Learning to access: Ensuring all children and young people have opportunities to develop their own agency, voice and independence.
At the heart of the framework is a set of three fundamental aims:
- To help clarify and define the elements of specialist skill development, interventions and best practice support that are considered to be essential for children and young people with vision impairment.
- To assist qualified specialist practitioners in raising the awareness amongst other professionals and parents of the need for children and young people with vision impairment to be taught skills that enable them to access the curriculum and the wider world with as much independence as possible.
- To aid discussions and understanding amongst all involved in a child or young person’s education of how and when these skills should be taught by suitably qualified specialists and reinforced by non-specialists.