History of MOVE
MOVE has been used in the UK and Europe for 26 years, but that’s not where our history ends
You may know what the MOVE Programme is like now, but you may not know it’s long history! MOVE is neither new nor limited to the UK, the programme began almost 40 years ago in the USA. In the 1980s, Dr Linda Bidabe, a special needs teacher in California, noticed that the majority of her time with the disabled young people she worked with was spent passively interacting with them during mealtimes, medical care and personal care. She was part of a growing realisation that profoundly disabled children were not getting enough opportunities to learn the vital mobility skills that they needed to access education and prepare for their adult lives.
In response to this, she developed a mobility programme designed to include motivating and functional movement practises at every opportunity during the day every day. The concept spread rapidly to other schools and in 1991 the first official MOVE Programme was written.
In 1994, the charity MOVE International was established to oversee the MOVE Programme in the US, and 3 years later, in 1997, MOVE Europe was set up to coordinate the MOVE Programme across the UK and Europe.
26 years later, MOVE Europe is used by over 140 special schools and therapy teams across the UK, and that number increases every year!
