John Chilton is a Special Educational Needs School in West London. Our school is for pupils with physical disabilities such as cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy, as well as for those on the autistic spectrum, with learning difficulties such as ADHD and also medical needs such as epilepsy. Teachers work collaboratively along side support staff, nurses and therapists for physio and speech support, delivering bespoke care, emotional and social support and enhanced learning opportunities. We are always encouraging independence, confidence and motivation through creativity, while championing individuality and self expression. We believe in giving all children a voice when they may find the words or means of expressing them challenging. Many of our children speak English as an additional language, use communication aids, computers and specially adapted devices to support their learning and to express their interpretaion of their worlds and experiences.

The project took place in December with our year 9 and 10 pupils over a period of 5 days. We began this process by looking at 4 skills areas- marbling, pottery, sewing and textile collage. We explored these while thinking carefully about our physical skills as well as our communication, sharing, empathy and listening. We worked closely together to decide which skills we wanted to focus on for our final product. We then explored the theme of work in very open terms- what it means to be an adult, what we thought work was for and how our own disabilities will affect our work choices, thinking carefully about what skills we feel we can offer and how to be independent. We discussed the importance of feeling safe at work, comfortable, listened to. We consolidated these ideas in our individual pieces- each pupil producing an individual panel expressing their own interpretation of what ‘work’ means to them, completed using their own choice of the skills we learnt at the beginning of the sessions. We then fitted these panels together to make 2 larger pieces. We feel that these repressent not only the world of work but also John Chilton pupils: individual ideas that work well on their own but also fit carefully together with those of others.This is all our students’ own work.

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