What is Talkabout?
Talkabout is a well-established social communication skills programme, popular around the world to help both children and adults develop social communication, self-esteem and friendship skills, and more recently sex and relationship skills. There are currently ten Talkabout books which include intervention programmes for different age groups, and there are also additional resources to supplement intervention, including the Talkabout Boardgame, Talkabout card games, Talkabout Posters and the Talkabout Video Library. The Talkabout Assessment CD was published separately in 2009 as another supplementary resource and gave users of Talkabout the ability to assess social skills using a software programme that then generated the ‘Talkabout Wheel’ – a summary of an individual’s social skills profile. The TASS is the latest addition to the Talkabout programme, replacing the Talkabout Assessment CD, and giving the assessor the ability to complete a holistic assessment of social communication and associated factors.
Talkabout in summary is…
- A hierarchical approach to teaching social communication: foundation skills are taught prior to more complex skills.
- Includes an assessment and outcome measures: the TASS provides a tool to quantify results and measure effectiveness of intervention.
- Includes activities and plans of intervention: Talkabout is a scheme of work that is designed to be followed week by week, with resources that can be used to plan your intervention easily.
- Suitable for all ages: the different books are designed with a certain population in mind, so that you will use the resource best suited to your client group, from young children (4+) to adults. Please see our short video of Alex explaining this.
- Suitable to put onto a school curriculum: most of the Talkabout resources have been written with schools in mind, so that teachers can easily put social skills into their lessons or onto their curriculum.
- Proven effectiveness: Talkabout has been proved to be an effective tool for developing self-esteem, social skills and friendship skills and we are happy to share evidence from schools who have measured their progress. Please see our short video of Naomi explaining the results of her research.