Guidance Documents

The Learning for Living guidance documents are a collection of paper-based and web-based resources, some with DVDs including video footage for staff development, and CD-ROMs containing electronic versions of the guidance and training modules.

What is this guidance aiming to achieve?

The title Learning for Living is based on the principle that Skills for Life extends far wider than simply learning aimed at improving speaking, listening, reading, writing and numeracy, using the core curricula. Through your teaching, learners can have the opportunity to explore their potential – providing them with the tools to:

• know who they are and who they want to become;
• experience new possibilities and opportunities;
• build on their strengths and develop new skills;
• adapt to change;
• be proactive.

Such opportunities have often been denied to learners with learning difficulties or disabilities, because of lack of access, low expectations and/or the prejudicial attitudes of others, including assumptions that are based on limited cultural experiences.

Who is the guidance for?

These guidance documents build on the experience of people working in a range of settings, with learners at a range of curriculum levels, and with a variety of learning needs. The suite of guidance documents are aimed at anyone working with people with learning difficulties or disabilities in the areas of communication, literacy, language (ESOL) and numeracy, and also in the area of the Wider Key Skills of Working with Others, Improving Own Learning and Performance and Problem Solving. Some of you may also be working with ICT (information and communications technology) as a way of supporting learners to access or record information or as another way of communicating, within various activities. You may be working with learners who require opportunities to develop other important skills such as thinking skills; physical, orientation and mobility skills; organisation and study skills; personal and social skills; decision and choice making; risk taking and safety skills; and self-advocacy. Some of you might be teaching learners with a disability or learning difficulty who are also from a different ethnic background; this guidance will be of use to you in all of these situations.

Some of you may be working in education settings such as colleges and adult learning centres. You may be encouraging learning through your work in social services centres or residential homes, in work-based learning organisations or in prisons or the probation service. Some of you will be practitioners, managing the learning process; others will be managers – responsible for ensuring that your organisation develops and sustains the optimum conditions for learning.

We hope that the guidance can offer you new food for thought in planning, delivering and evaluating learning with these learners.

Guidance documents to download or order

Each document within this ‘family’ of guidance materials has a different emphasis, and the key focus and purpose of each is outlined for you below.

Before reading any other documents in the suite we strongly recommend that you read the introduction, this document looks at some of the questions you might be asking about this suite of guidance.

To find out more information on each document and to download your version free click on the title of the document below

If you would prefer a hardcopy these are available to order free from LSIS Publications: