Westmead Feelings Program
About us
The Westmead Feelings Program is a suite of therapeutic materials that health, education and disability professionals can use to support autistic children, and develop cultures of emotional learning around the child by providing parents and teachers with skills to be emotion coaches at home and school.
There are 2 facilitator certification courses for health and education professionals who work with autistic children, helping children develop skills to understand and manage emotions such as anxiety and anger.
Contact
What we do
The Westmead Feelings Program improves emotion skills of autistic children.
Two clinical trials evaluated 2 versions of the Westmead Feelings Program in 64 Department of Education Schools across metropolitan, rural, and regional New South Wales. A total of 64 school counsellors were trained and certified as Westmead Feelings Program Facilitators and delivered the program to over 300 children, their families, and teachers.
The results revealed significant improvements in children’s emotional competence skills, with large effect sizes comparing treatment to control groups, improvements in children’s behaviour and social skills, and reductions in symptoms of child anxiety and depression.
Our courses
Resources
Resource kits
We offer resource kits with printed and digital materials for facilitators, children, parents, teachers.
Learn more about the resource kits and how to purchase them.
Worksheets and questionnaire
Our emotion development resources are designed to help educators develop individual and meaningful emotion-based goals for the children and young people that they support.
These resources include:
- The Emotions Development Questionnaire (EDQ) - an assessment measure that teachers can use as an evaluation tool before and after completing the Westmead Feelings Program.
- Identifying Emotion Skill Goals worksheet - a worksheet that can help teachers to start identifying emotion development skills in autistic children and young people.
- Emotion Development Questionnaire - Goal Setting - a tool that can assist teachers in developing Goal Attainment Scale (GAS) goals for emotion skill development across a range of settings.