PgCert Collaborative Working: Education and Therapy

Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh

This course offers an innovative interdisciplinary learning opportunity for education staff and allied health professionals. Its flexible delivery pattern means that you can fit study around your career.

There is a need for improved collaboration around children with additional needs and disabilities. Different professional systems can result in different perspectives and philosophies - things get ‘lost in translation’. More effective collaboration can make a real difference to children. This course has been developed to respond to this need.

Why QMU?

• This PgCert will help you become a reflective, evidence-based practitioner, enhancing your abilities to make a real difference to the lives of pupils with additional needs.
• Your course tutors will be highly experienced practitioners and research-active academics.
• Our very active research in this field feeds directly into this course, helping to inform the teaching and keep you up to date.
• This course is flexible to fit in with your current career. You can complete it fully online or choose a blend of online and classroom attendance.

Course overview

If you are an education or allied health professional who works with children and young people, this course may be of interest. It will equip you to support children or young people with additional support needs/special educational needs to access the curriculum and participate in school life through enhanced collaborative working.

On this course, you will:

• Engage with contemporary inclusive learning issues, related legislative frameworks and policy, and relate these to your own practice context
• Learn to critique evidence-based approaches and strategies to facilitate collaboration and inclusion for children with additional support needs
• Have the opportunity to identify and advance practice in an area of innovative collaborative working within your workplace/ service

In the context of this course, ‘pupils’ are defined as children or young people who are attending school (this can be within early years, primary or secondary school, in mainstream or special school settings).These pupils have additional support needs, which are currently, or could be in the future, supported by the direct or indirect assistance of education and therapy staff working collaboratively.

Teaching, learning and assessment

Teaching comprises a combination of lectures, group exercises, projects and online discussion. A fully online (distance) option is also available. Methods of formative assessment include evaluation of critical incidents, case studies, work based projects, self appraisal and/or reflective reports, and online discussions and postings. Summative assessments comprise written assignments submitted at the end of each module.

Careers

This course is particularly beneficial to teaching staff as part of their Professional Update. The course supports allied health professional career development in line with Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) standards, professional body standards and the NHS Knowledge and Skills Framework. This programme meets the needs of staff who want to enhance their knowledge, understanding and practice, and to develop their understanding of contemporary theories at a master’s level, meeting requirements for career progression. This course aims to recruit those who wish to develop expertise and skills in their personal practice and/or those who are working in, or wish to progress towards, positions of expertise with responsibility for leading innovation in collaborative working with partner agencies.

Exit awards

PgCert (60 credits)