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All delegates are welcome to attend the breakfast discussion however places will be limited to 20 per session and must be pre-booked.
Places will be allocated on a first come first served basics.
Please register for the session you wish to attend below, stating your name, organisation and discussion title
A discussion facilitated by Carol Povey, Responsible Individual and Head of Service Quality, NAS & Professor Greg O’Brien, Consultant Psychiatrist, Northumberland Tyne and Wear NHS Trust.
This breakfast debate will be of interest to all people who work with people with complex and challenging behaviour. Discussing the ethical dilemma of protecting society and ensuring people with ASD have opportunities to live full lives in the community, the debate will look at how services can respond to the needs of individuals in the community with high risk behaviours.
How do we support and manage people with very challenging behaviour who offend and become involved with the criminal justice system and how do we work with the prison, young justice and probation systems to be able to respond to the needs of people with ASD?
Small groups of professionals will have the opportunity to discuss their experiences and share learning led by Carol & Greg.
Suzie Franklin, parent of a child with autism and help! Family Support Programme Officer, Lesley Waugh, Person-Centred Planning Coordinator, and Debbie Waters, Project Officer Family Services at The National Autistic Society.
“At the point of diagnosis of a child’s disability… families are frightened, disturbed, upset, grieving and constantly vulnerable. The role of the professionals involved with them is to catch them when they fall, listen to their sorrow, dry their tears of pain and anguish, and, when the time is right, plan the pathway forward.” (Carpenter, 2005)
Suzie has many years of experience working with parents of children with autism, as well as being a parent herself and she knows the problems many professionals face when trying to balance the needs of the parents versus the resources available. The discussion will focus on how you can better support parents after diagnosis through multi-team working and sharing solutions and knowledge. This will be a small group discussion for professionals across education, local authority and health functions.
Jane Vaughan, Interim Director of Education, The National Autistic Society and Annie Etherington, Senior Advisory Teacher for ASC, ASC Specialist Team, Education Services, London Borough of Barnet will introduce the debate which will discuss:
Are we actually making a difference to the cultures of schools?
How do we have maximum impact on whole school practice?
What more to we need to do to make it a reality that all children with autism can access the whole life of a school?
Training and information giving (such as the IDP) is an important start. However, we need to THINK autism: from organising the classroom, lighting, display boards to training the care taker and the pupils.
“No matter how good the idea, no matter how exciting the practice in individual classrooms, an attempted change will fade and die without whole school practices in place to support it” (1)
1 in 5 children with autism have been excluded form school and 67% of these have been excluded more than once (2). Pupils with ASD are more likely to be excluded than any other group of children with SEN except for those with BESD (3). Extrapolated to the total population of children with ASD, these figures suggest that at least 20,000 children with ASD in England at the present time have been excluded from school at some time.
With 1 in 100 now receiving a diagnosis, every teacher and adult working in a school will meet at least one child on the Autism Spectrum in their careers. Most will meet many. It is crucial that we embed understanding of the needs of this population into every school.
(1) Renton L 1993 the School is us: A practical guide to successful whole School change: WWWF ltd
(2) NAs (2006) Make School Make Sense
(3) DCSF (2009) Permanent and fixed term exclusions form school in England 2007/8.
This discussion will be facilitated by Mark Lever, Chief Executive, The National Autistic Society
This discussion will be facilitated by Mark Lever, Chief Executive, The National Autistic Society
What impact will the National Adult Autism Strategy for England and the Autism Act have on how we work together and what lessons are there from Wales?
The passing of the Autism Act 2009 was a landmark event for adults with autism in the UK. The Act sets out that the Government had to produce a strategy for adults with autism by 1st April 2010. The Act also puts a duty on the Government to publish statutory guidance for local authorities and local health bodies by 31st December 2010.
The strategy was published on 3rd Marchand in Wales, the ASD strategic action plan has been in place for almost two years. In both strategies, there are number of actions that set out the need for inter-agency working.
How has the action plan in Wales led to better inter-agency working? What impact is the strategy having on the ground in Wales. What implications does this have for the implementation of the English strategy? What can England learn from the Welsh experience? What progress is being made in NI and Scotland?
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