Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-04-27.
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what training is provided to teachers on working with children who have autism spectrum disorder.
Edward Timpson
The Department has contracted with the Autism Education Trust since 2011 to deliver autism training to education professionals. The Trust has now trained more than 90,000 education professionals. The Department is also funding work by the National Autistic Society to provide information and advice to parents and professionals on exclusions, and work to integrate into the Autism Education Trust training the learning from a previous project by Ambitious about Autism on strategies for supporting transition from school to college for students with autism.
We have also supported Nasen’s Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Gateway (www.sendgateway.org.uk). This offers education professionals free, easy access to high quality information, resources and training for meeting the needs of children with SEND, including those with autism. In 2015-16, the Department also funded Nasen to develop a free universal offer of SEN Continuous Professional Development for teachers.
The National College for Teaching and Leadership has produced a series of specialist online courses, one of which focuses on autism. The training materials are designed to support teachers in mainstream schools who want to improve their skills in teaching pupils with SEND. The training materials can be found at: www.education.gov.uk/lamb.
In order to be awarded qualified teacher status, trainees must satisfy the Teachers’ Standards, which include a requirement that they have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with SEND, and are able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support them.
Following Sir Andrew Carter’s independent review of the quality and effectiveness of Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses, the Secretary of State appointed an independent working group made up of expert representatives from the sector to develop a framework of core ITT content. This includes considering Sir Andrew’s recommendations around the SEND content of the proposed framework. The working group is due to report to the Department soon. We will consider their recommendations carefully and determine how they should be taken forward.
