328-332 Bromford Lane, Birmingham, B8 2SD

0121 8090666

Heart of Birmingham Vocational College

Providing valuable lifelong learning

Independent Living Skills

What will you be learning about?

During your Independent Living Skills (ILS) sessions you will be learning a wide range of skills related to three main areas: Home Management, Self-Care, and Food Preparation. By participating in ILS sessions, you will gain the knowledge, skills and understanding needed to develop your independence enabling you to manage different areas of your life, needing less support from others to do so. In Home Management sessions you will be learning how to safely maintain and manage areas of your home life. This will include participating in cleaning tasks and learning how to safely store and use different cleaning products. You will have the opportunity to use pieces of equipment often used in the home such as an iron, a hoover, or a washing machine and you will learn how to strip and change a bed. As part of your Self-Care sessions, you will be focusing on how to maintain a healthy, well-balanced life. You will learn about how to maintain positive personal hygiene, how to effectively look after your personal belongings and what you could do during your leisure time. You will participate in sessions to learn how to manage your personal finances, creating savings goals or calculating budgets, for example. You will participate in food and drink preparation tasks, learning methods and techniques such as weighing ingredients, chopping, peeling, and cleaning different food items and how to keep your kitchen or food preparation areas safe, clean, and tidy.  

 

How will you learn?

HBVC's Teaching and Learning team have the freedom to plan tasks and sessions and deliver them in whichever way is best to support you and each individual learner at HBVC. 

Our Teaching and Learning team will consider your personalised learning needs as well as the learning needs of each learner to prepare personalised tasks, sessions, and resources to support all aspects of learning for every learner. Sessions will cover a range of learning topics which will promote and develop your independence in the home environment and other settings. You will be given opportunities to develop skills to enable you to fulfil your Independent Living Skills aspirations. Sessions will be sequenced to ensure you are able to build upon previous learning, session by session, allowing for clear progression. Sessions will consist of a variety of activities, such as group discussion, paired tasks, and practical activities. Sessions will accommodate a variety of teaching and learning methods, including visual, verbal, physical, logical, social, and solitary strategies. Resources, questioning and strategies will be personalised for you. The learning environment and activities within a session aim to replicate elements of a home environment in order for you to experience real life situations using working appliances and equipment. 

 

How will this support you?

By participating in ILS sessions, you will have developed your independence in a wide range of areas related to independent living. You will be able to complete different food and drink preparation tasks so that you can make something to eat or drink, requiring less support from others. These skills could be transferred to different areas such as where you live or where you work. You will gain the knowledge needed to use different pieces of kitchen and food preparation equipment to do this. This might be learning how to use a set of scales to weigh out some ingredients or learning how to safely use a grill or an oven.

You will be able to participate in keeping areas of your home clean, tidy, and safe. You will know which products and equipment are used for different home-management tasks, and you will know how to complete these tasks safely and effectively. This will enable you to complete these tasks in your own home, or support others to do so to keep your living spaces clean, tidy, and safe. In practical terms, this will mean that you will know how to safely use things like a hoover or an iron. This will give you more independence in managing different areas of you home-life.

You will be able to manage other areas of your life more independently such as your own personal finances, your personal hygiene or by learning how to keep your personal belongings safely stored away.

By taking part in HBVC’s ILS sessions, our aim is for you to learn as many skills as possible and take on as much new knowledge as you can to enable you to lead your life with as much independence as possible. We want you to be able to develop your existing skills in these sessions too, so that you can explore as many of the areas mentioned above, requiring less support from others in order to do this.