Autism Support Team
The Autism Support Team is a small team of professionals who specialise in autism. This includes specialist teachers, teaching assistants, and speech and language therapist, a post diagnosis support worker and an early years autism support officer.
We provide an outreach service to early years providers and maintained primary schools in Southwark. Support can be requested by an educational setting with parental consent.
Outreach support provides support to class teachers, teaching assistants, early years practitioners and other members of an educational setting to meet the individual teaching, learning and wellbeing needs of autistic children in their nursery/school.
We provide:
- whole setting level support to develop and apply principles of good autism practice to meet autism spectrum disorder (ASD) needs in the mainstream
- targeted individual child support to those with a confirmed diagnosis.
What can the Autism Support Team help with?
- Learning and development
- The observation of indvidual children at their educational setting, providing feedback, advice and recommendations.
- Reception age support working alongside class teachers and teaching assistants to develop and build upon autism good practice for all.
- Support to differentiate the curriculum
- Support to develop resources, such as visuals prompts, reward systems, and task checklists.
- Attendance at meetings to provide specific guidance for children, such as Annual Reviews, Team Around the Child and Team Around the Family.
- Transitional support to new phases of education, such as nursery to school or primary to secondary school.
- Please look at our 'page resources' for some helpful material to support children's transitions.
We currently do not do offer a service to Southwark's secondary schools or post-16 provision. This is something we hope to be able to provide in the future.
Our Early Years Autism Support Officer can help support the priorities of parents/carers and their child's nursery setting, such as help to develop:
- communication
- interaction and play skills
- independence including toileting, eating, and sleeping.
They can also work with nursery staff to develop their knowledge of autism.
On the resources section of this page we have included a number of specific autism support and intervention resources for schools to download.
How to access our service
Please complete our Request for Support form to access our services.
Alternatively, if would like to access whole class support for reception classes, working alongside class teachers and teaching assistants to develop and build upon autism good practice at a universal level, please complete our Reception age: Request for Support form.
Requests must completed by an educational setting. In order for us to provide support the child must have a formal diagnosis of autism. The form must be completed in full and signed by the child's parent or carer.
Please note that all referrals are allocated on a fortnightly basis and someone will contact you within two weeks of submitting the request to agree the next steps.