Excellent education
The origins of our organisation are based on the firm belief in the right of all autistic children and young people to an excellent and inclusive education.
Like anyone else, autistic people want to learn, thrive and achieve and ultimately have a good quality of life. This includes the realistic prospect of living and working as part of their community.
Our education settings
In our education settings we are determined to achieve the best possible outcomes with our children and young people, in their time at school or college, and beyond.
This means supporting young people to achieve in all aspects of their lives – learning, health, citizenship, family and relationships, employment, and the successful move from our settings to a life beyond school or college.
Autistic children and young people must lead the way as we support them to grow and progress. To achieve this, we must continue to develop each of our settings to meet the needs of learners now and in the future. Meanwhile, we’ll provide ongoing support in the aftermath and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Beyond our settings we will improve policy and practice nationally by drawing on our experience as a provider. More importantly, we will amplify the voices of autistic children and young people, and their families to influence change.
Our goals
We will continue to embed, evaluate, and refine our Ambitious Approach and use it to improve our careers education practice and support meaningful transitions and progression for autistic children and young people.
We will then share our model and expertise in autism education nationally through our policy and influencing, information, training, consultancy, and national partnership work.
Our priority is to support autistic children and young people within our education settings to live through and recover from the coronavirus pandemic. To enable them to achieve positive outcomes through careers education and support to progress onto education, employment or training.
We will develop our existing settings to respond to increasing and changing demand. Specifically, we will focus on developing each setting as a centre of excellence for the wider community, growing primary and sixth form provision in our schools and diversifying our college offer.
We will also align the offers at our schools’ sixth forms with that at our college to achieve clear pathways and better outcomes for young people.
We will develop new settings, including a free school in Kingston, and consider further opportunities for new services and partnerships with aligned education providers.
Our guiding principle will be to ensure any new services provide an excellent and inclusive education.
Youth Council member, Emily, speaks openly about navigating school as an autistic young person.
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