Autism Education Trust Programme, Supported by DofE

[moosemama]

Ok, so no replies to my other thread must mean either not many people are aware of this, or the people who are are on holiday.

It claims to be the first national autism training programme for schools. Some info about it here and here.

Basically there are three levels. The first level 'awareness' is free, the second level is only £95.00 and the third £190.00, so easily affordable to schools, leaving no excuse for untrained staff to be supporting children who have autism.

The first, free level, has already taken place once and the other two levels are being rolled out this September.

The website dedicated to it is here.

Gosh they have only managed to run level 1 once across the whole country ? They look as though they might be very good once they get up and running - NAS involved - their Early Bird courses are excellent imho - but one course since Feb ? I wonder what the problem is - lack of interest from attendees / lack of publicity or lack of oomph/resources from the providers?

Level 1 was run at my DCs school, but it didn't seem to make a lot of difference to the attitude of the staff!

Some still have little or no understanding

NotOnUrNelly, I think the ones run so far this year may have been part of a pilot scheme and it's being properly rolled out this September.

creamteas, our school ran an almost identical awareness course early last year (although run by our local outreach team) and as you said, with certain members of staff it made little or no difference, but with the others there was an immediate and significant improvement in the way they handled my ds.

I am really interested in the level 2 and 3 courses as they have just been written into my ds's statement.

Oddly, as of yesterday morning his statement didn't require his support to have any more than the basic awareness course the school has already done, despite the EP who wrote the SA report agreeing with me that that wasn't enough. I found this programme on the net via Google yesterday, after the LEA showed signs of agreeing to quantify skills/qualifications.

By this afternoon this afternoon had been amended to include a requirement for them to have initial training in the relevant areas, followed by continued professional development in relation to Autism support, to include completion of this programme.

The odd thing is that I didn't mention the programme to anyone. They just happened to come up with the same thing.

Even weirder is that they told me this time last week that they flatly refused to make any more amendments to the statement. I did make some concessions to the content, but wasn't expecting them to do any more.

Ooh I'm going to forward the details to dd's HT, he's one of the good ones and I'm on very good terms with the SEN Governor who has an AS son so might copy her in too Thanks Moose

They say across England, but there isn't a training hub in the Northeast. Oldham is the best part of half a day's drive away - not so cheap when overnight accomodation would have to be factored in.

Our local hub is based at ds's school so 40 minutes away from dd's so I can't see that being a problem (our LA will pay 45p per mile plus subsistence) and if ds's school is leading the training then it will be great.Definitely going to push HT to look into it and I have dd's statement to agree which states experienced and qualified support so might be able to tag that on as well.

insanity, sounds hopeful. Hope they are interested.

ouryve, I hadn't realised that. Yes you're right, if there is are overnight stays involved it would put the price up considerably. It does say they are intending to expand it to other areas of the country, but it's not looking like being any time soon unfortunately.