Education support refers to the supplemental teaching, learning, and mentoring that schools provide to students who are struggling in school or have special needs.
It focuses on helping students overcome learning challenges, enabling them to achieve their full academic potential. It involves providing a variety of strategies, including both classroom and after-hours options.
Academic Support
Academic support is a broad category of educational strategies that include tutoring sessions, supplemental courses, summer learning experiences, after-school programs, teacher advisors, and volunteer mentors. It can be used to meet the needs of individual students, specific student populations (such as non-English speakers or disabled students), or all students in a school.
A variety of studies have shown that academic support can improve a student’s performance in class and help them to learn more effectively. It can also help a student with learning disabilities or other specialized learning needs to become more self-sufficient in the classroom.
A meta-analysis of 65 recent studies involving 121 effects and 58,368 students found that teacher support was correlated with academic emotions (both positive and negative). Culture, age, and gender moderated these relations.
Social Support
Social support is the perceived and actual availability of help or assistance to someone from a group, person, organization, or other source. This can be a friend helping you pack for a trip across the country, a church group pooling their money together to support a family that recently lost a job or a student sharing a textbook with a classmate.
A number of studies have linked social support to positive outcomes for students (Conley et al., 2020; Poots & Cassidy, 2020; Reeve et al., 2013; Scanlon et al., 2020), and it has also been found to moderate stress levels in first year students (Jun et al., 2018; Kirby et al., 2015; Poots & Cassidy, 2017).
Research has shown that school-related social support can be an important protective factor for HRQoL and self-competence of children and adolescents from immigrant families (Noam et al., 2014). Our findings support the view that parents’ limited knowledge about the German educational system, the language difficulties these families encounter and their own low level of education, may restrict parental social support to students from immigrant backgrounds.
Behavioural Support
Behaviour support is a schoolwide approach to behaviour management, using research-based strategies to reduce problem behavior. It also helps students to learn more prosocial skills and builds better classroom cultures.
Behavioral support professionals work one-on-one with students to provide them with a positive and constructive way to interact with their peers, teachers, and other staff. They also work with families to develop a plan that will help them understand the underlying causes of their child’s problematic behaviour and develop effective solutions.
They also work with school administrators and teachers to develop a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) that focuses on a variety of different needs. Tier one supports are universal and can help all students, while tier two supports are more targeted and focus on 10-15% of students who need more individualized assistance.
Behaviour support specialists often use a Functional Behaviour Analysis (FBA) approach to determine the purpose for inappropriate behaviours, and design an intervention that meets those individual needs. It’s a more effective way to handle challenging behaviour than punitive methods and is less likely to cause harm.
Personal Support
Personal support workers are a vital part of the health care industry, supporting people living with illness or disability. Their job is to ensure that clients have the support they need at home or in a hospital environment.
A personal support worker can be an excellent career option for people without formal training or qualifications who want to help those in need. The role requires the ability to provide quality, holistic support to clients and their families in accordance with their plan of care, as well as professional boundaries and employer policies.
One of the most important things a personal support worker does is demonstrate emotional support to their clients’ families. They do this by providing progress reports on their client’s condition, as well as helping them cope with the feelings associated with the patient’s illness or disability.