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Portage and Autism Ranking: Insufficient/Mixed evidence

Key Features

Portage (also known as Portage Model or the Portage Home Teaching Program)  is a home-based teaching programme for preschool children with special educational needs. The children are taught new skills through the use of questions and tasks, prompts, and rewards. Parents and carers are shown how to apply this system by a weekly or fortnightly visit from a Portage home visitor.

The Portage home visitor

According to National Carers Service website, accessed July 2013, the portage home visitor

  • observes the child and talks to the parents to identify the skills the child already has
  • decides with the parents which skills are most important for the child's future learning
  • suggests a programme of activities for the parents and child to practise together
  • breaks down tasks that are difficult or take a long time into small steps
  • provides an activity chart or notebook for parents to record their child's progress
  • visits each week to check on progress and agree on new goals
  • writes progress reports and works with the parents to develop long-term goals

Portage Materials

According to Cameron 1997, the portage worker shows the parents how to use a variety of portage materials. Those materials include the portage checklist, the portage teaching cards and the portage activity chart.

The Portage checklist

"This developmental checklist is used to identify the child’s existing repertoire of skills in the follows areas: self help: motor, language, social, and cognitive development. In addition, there is a section of ‘infant stimulation’ activities which could be used either with very young children, or with older children who had acquired very few skills. The checklist can be used both for an initial assessment and to provide the information necessary to select appropriate future teaching objectives for the child."

The Portage teaching cards

"A card file provides specific teaching instructions for each of the 600 or so items in the Portage checklist.  These cards have two main functions – providing useful teaching hints, particularly for new or inexperienced home teachers and providing suggestions on different ways of teaching the same skills, thus enabling the child to generalize and adapt the skills taught."

The Portage activity chart

"This is a carefully designed procedure which allows parents to teach their child and also record the results of their teaching effort.  Each activity chart it written to a carefully worked out formula which not only specifies the activity to be taught but also how it is to be taught and at what level of success."

Updated
17 Jun 2022
Last Review
01 Jan 2017
Next Review
01 May 2023