This week’s webinar was an overview and history behind Autism Progress and the aims of the project, with our first guest presenter Jasmine Miller. Jasmine was involved with Autism Progress from the very beginning, over 5 years ago. She was involved with every stage of the project, including getting B Squared involved. Autism Progress started off as a project between 3 autism charities – Scottish Autism, Autism Wessex and the North East Autism Society. The charities wanted a way to better support pupils and adults with autism and part of this was a better understanding of how someone’s autism affected them. This involved building a detailed profile of a person’s autism. Autism Progress compliments SCERTS, but is designed to be more accessible by a wider range of professionals.
As part of the webinar we conducted a few polls. The first question was ‘How confident are you in working with an autistic individual and understanding levels of support and levels of engagement?’ Over half were very confident, another 35% were gaining in confidence and only 7% were not very confident.
The second question was ‘Do you currently have a way of profiling Autism in your service or school?’ 56% of responses said they didn’t have a way of profiling autism in their school, 13% didn’t know and 31% had a way of profiling autism.
The third question was ‘How many times a day do you refer to an autistic person’s profile/assessment/support plan/all about me overview?’ 35% of responses indicated that they never referred to the plan/profile on a daily basis, 38% refer to the plan/profile once or twice a day, and 22% use it 3 or more times a day.
The final question was ‘How often do you create opportunities for an autistic individual to learn about creating strategies to address their feelings?’ Responses show that 50% constantly create opportunities, 43% create opportunities once or twice a day and only 7% do not create daily opportunities.
Overall the responses to the polls were positive around profiling autism, but in terms of how someone’s autism is supported on a daily basis, there is room for improvement. There could be many reasons for this including time, sufficient training, support, school ethos or access to tools to support the professional.
Autism Progress has 2 equally useful aspects. The first is the ability to profile someone’s autism in an easy to manage way. The profile is detailed, but Connecting Steps (B Squared’s assessment software) makes it manageable to create and also provides information to professionals in identifying next steps and celebrating progress. The second aspect is the strategies. Professionals can use tools to profile someone’s autism, but once you have built the profile, what is the next step? How do you help create learning opportunities? What resources are available? When I first got involved with the Autism Progress project I was focusing on the profiling and the benefits the profile gives. I hadn’t realised the importance of the strategies and how powerful/useful they would be to professionals using Autism Progress. Schools are now using these strategies as part of the EHCP process.
Handouts.
As part of the webinar we have provided a number of handouts you may find useful when evaluating Autism Progress, these can be found below:
- Autism Progress Guide – 28 page document giving you an overview of Autism Progress. It goes through the 4 different areas that are used as part of the profile, it explains how the Autism Progress tool can be used and it has the level descriptors which show the developmental range of the tool.
- Sample from Autism Progress – a 2 page document which contains the profile for Communication Level 6 (neurotypical developmental age of 15 months approximately) and also the strategies for Communication Level 6.
We have also been asked to provide an approximate age to level conversion for Autism Progress, this can be found below.
