The Essential for Living assessment: the skills that matter most every day

Essential for Living (EFL) is a behavior-analytic assessment, curriculum and practitioner’s handbook by Patrick McGreevy, Troy Fry and Colleen Cornwall for children and adults with moderate-to-severe disabilities and limited speech. Essential for Living is organized around function, not development: it asks which skills a person needs to be safe, healthy and as independent as possible.

The question is not “what does a typical 3-year-old do?” but “what does this person need now and as an adult?” That is why EFL suits older learners and adults that developmental tools like the VB-MAPP were not built for.

Communication in EFL is not limited to speech. A learner can make requests with signs, pictures, a speech-generating device or another method, and the handbook helps teams choose one. A 12-year-old who reaches for a cup and cries when thirsty can learn to request it with a picture card from a PECS book, which already changes the day for everyone.

The Essential Eight are the must-have skills in Essential for Living: making requests, waiting, accepting removals, completing required tasks, accepting “no”, and following directions, completing daily living skills and tolerating situations related to health and safety. EFL teaches these eight first, because without them a person has fewer choices and more restrictions.

EFL groups skills into must-have, should-have, good-to-have and nice-to-have; the must-have skills from four domains form the Essential Eight. Visual supports help with several of them: a first-then board is a common support for waiting and completing required tasks.

The Essential for Living Quick Assessment is the short first step of EFL, filled in with people who know the learner well, such as a parent, teacher or support worker. The Quick Assessment points the team to the skills and sections of the full Essential for Living assessment that matter most for this person.

The full Essential for Living assessment is organized into skill domains plus a separate section on problem behavior. The EFL domains cover requests, listener responses and naming, answering questions and conversation, daily living, functional academics, tolerating, and the tool and component skills, such as matching and imitating, that other skills build on.

Essential for Living records progress with performance criteria that go beyond absent, prompted or independent, including fluency. Because EFL ratings capture smaller steps, progress reports show real movement even when a skill is not yet fully independent, which matters for learners whose progress is real but slow.

The exact rating criteria are in the official handbook. Day-to-day trials and problem behavior can be logged on free ABA data sheets and charted with the ABA graph maker.