POA Learning has been supporting a student with Autism from the Isle of Wight gain qualifications and improve her confidence.

Sarah Blake is an 18 year girl who lives in Rookley on the island and was referred to Dave Logan, Regional Centre Manager at the Isle of Wight POA Learning Centre, through a combination of the Isle of Wight College and her mother, who felt that she would gain from extra tuition to help her achieve her maths and English Functional Skills qualifications

Sarah is on the autistic spectrum which affects her social skills and was advised to concentrate on one qualification at a time and chose to work on mathematics initially.

Dave takes up the story;

One of the main challenges in working with Sarah was her short concentration span which was combined with a tendency to be very easily distracted by anything else that was going on in the room.

Sarah was only attending the college for a couple of hours a week and so was attending 3 of the 4 drop in sessions that we hold every week. This meant that she was spending close to 10 hours a week with us.

We found that the best way to get results with Sarah was to work fairly intensively with her for short periods of time, about 20 minutes was the upper limit of her concentration span. We would then set her work to do at home."

A breakthrough came when Sarah was in the room alongside an entry level student the student was struggling and asked Sarah for some advice – Sarah spent the next hour happily helping this student with her work, as she explained it to another student it became apparent that she did actually understand the subject.

From that point on Dave encouraged Sarah to help other students and this seemed to build her confidence and social skills and also allow her to fill her time more satisfactorily when at the Learning Centre.

Over a period of approximately 4 months the POA Learning team had moved Sarah to the point where they considered her ready to sit a maths level 2 exam. They coached Sarah extensively on past papers, but their worry was that her concentration would not hold for the duration of the exam.

But the hard work paid off and Dave explained that;

Despite our worries Sarah did pass her level 2 paper and is now working on her English with us."