Registration desk, materials collection and the opening of the seminar.
Programme Schedule
Explore events, day-wise sessions, speakers, and timings in a clear, accessible format designed for easy reading and smooth navigation.
Seminar on WSNA: A New Paradigm in Support Needs Assessment
Twelve sessions across two days, introducing the Weighted Support Need Assessment (WSNA) — a nine-domain, lifespan framework that measures the support a person needs rather than counting what they cannot do. The programme moves from why the paradigm changed, through the structure of the instrument, to hands-on case practice and implementation in schools, therapy centres, community programmes and families.
Day 1 · The paradigm and the framework
18 Sep 2026
Why an assessment that describes what a person cannot do rarely changes what happens on Monday morning. The session places WSNA in a lineage — ICF, the UNCRPD, the AAIDD supports paradigm, and the RPwD Act 2016 — and names the gap in Indian practice that the framework was built to fill.
Support need is a property of the fit between a person and their environment, not of the person alone. This session works through what follows from that — including the fact that support need can fall without the person changing at all.
Communication, learning, movement, daily living, feelings and behaviour, friends and community, own choices, work, and digital safety — with the reasoning behind the set, and why digital life earns a domain of its own in a country running on UPI, Aadhaar and WhatsApp.
Lunch is provided for participants registered on the materials and catering option.
The four levels — Intermittent, Limited, Extensive, Pervasive — defined operationally rather than impressionistically, together with the highest-domain rule and the safety override. Includes the question that makes two assessors agree: if nobody helped, what would actually happen?
WSNA is an interview, not a form. This session covers who must be in the room, the question wordings that produce a usable answer, and the four commonest rating errors — beginning with rating the skill instead of the support.
Nine domains at four levels produce more need than any service can meet. This session gives a repeatable procedure for reducing that to two to four priorities — and for explaining the choice to a family that wanted something else.
Day 2 · Planning, practice and implementation
19 Sep 2026
Two grammars of goal-writing, and why the support-goal grammar rescues planning for people at Level 4. Includes the four fade dimensions along which any WSNA goal can move.
The difference between family-involved and family-centred practice, the evidence pathway by which the second produces child outcomes, and what makes a WSNA interview a partnership rather than an extraction. Includes parents from the Manovikas community speaking directly.
Four plan paths across five life stages, and the transfer of authority they represent — from the family holding the pen at 0-6 to the person holding it at 18 and beyond. Includes why the own-choices domain leads during transition.
International evidence finds support-need scores largely stable across one to three years. This session states that plainly and then sets out what can honestly be shown: change in profile shape, change in support type, goal attainment, and change in the environment itself.
Lunch is provided for participants registered on the materials and catering option.
A workshop, not a lecture. Four prepared Indian cases spanning the lifespan — a four-year-old in early intervention, a thirteen-year-old with emerging self-injury, a nineteen-year-old defrauded on UPI, and a thirty-four-year-old with ageing parents. Every participant completes a full assessment.
What implementation requires beyond the instrument — who administers it, how often, where the data lives, and who reviews it. Each of the four settings is addressed separately, because their constraints genuinely differ. Ends with a first step for your own setting.
Closing remarks, participant feedback, and distribution of certificates.