Talkabout for Children Book 3: Developing Friendship Skills

Talkabout is a complete programme for developing self-esteem, social and friendship skills. It is based on teaching children or young adults in groups in school or college but can be adapted for 1:1 sessions or for use at home. It uses a hierarchical method of developing skills where basic or foundation skills are taught before more complicated skills.

It was developed by Alex Kelly who worked in a FE college with a large number of young adults with intellectual disabilities. After a year of social skills interventions, using pre and post assessments, she noticed a pattern in who was responding and who wasn’t, centred around the hierarchy of self-awareness coming before non-verbal skills and non-verbal coming before verbal and assertiveness coming last. Alex developed an intervention based on this hierarchy that was published after extensive testing and piloting.