It is important that autistic children, as well as other children with special educational needs, get the right school placement, and some will need special school provision to reach their potential. To this end, we have committed to opening 37 new special free schools across the country, of which 24 have provision specifically for autistic children and young people. We will move forward with plans to open these schools, which are expected to start operating from September 2022. This will enable more children to get the right school placement closer to home. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep content for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services

In addition, we want to ensure that autistic people can get the adaptations or extra support they need while in work, or to get into work. As government, we will lead the way in becoming a more autism-inclusive employer by expanding our Autism Exchange Internship Programme, which is aimed at providing more autistic people with experience of working in the Civil Service. We will also begin to collect data on the number of autistic people working in our departments to understand further improvements we may need to make to recruit and support autistic people. The introduction of the Autism Act 2009 was ground-breaking because it was the first disability-specific piece of legislation in England. Over the decade since its inception, it has resulted in improvements in support for autistic adults across the country, and greater awareness of autism in society. However, we know that more still needs to be done to improve autistic people’s lives. As we set out in the Building the Right Support national plan in March 2015, all autistic people should have the opportunity to participate in their communities among friends and family, and live in their own home or with people they choose to live with. We are clear that people should not be in inpatient mental health settings unless absolutely necessary for clinical reasons, and set out our target of a 50% reduction in the number of autistic people and people with a learning disability in these settings by 2023 to 2024 (compared with March 2015 levels) in the NHS Long Term Plan. Since 2015, we have made progress towards this target, as we have achieved a net decrease in inpatient numbers of 28% as of June 2021 ( Assuring Transformation data).

By the end of the strategy, we will have also delivered significant improvements to the provision and quality of community support, including social care, mental health and housing support. This will prevent more autistic people from reaching crisis point. For autistic people who really need care in inpatient settings, we want to show this is of high quality, therapeutic and tailored to their needs, and as close to home as possible. Since its launch in 2018, ACT has helped prepare thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of individuals should the worst happen. continue to ensure that through the Disability Confident Scheme, we promote the skills and abilities of autistic people, and signpost employers to resources on supporting autistic people We know that frontline criminal and youth justice staff’s understanding of autism and wider neurodiversity issues needs to improve. Based on findings from the Neurodiversity call for evidence, we will develop a training toolkit for frontline staff on neurodiversity and the additional support people might need. We will also take steps to specifically upskill staff across the criminal and youth justice systems on autism, including prison staff, to help ensure autistic people receive the additional or adjusted support they may need. To this end, we will introduce an autism-specific session as part of the new prison staff ‘Custody and Detention’ apprenticeship, which will be undertaken by all new prison officers, in England and Wales. We will also consider autistic prisoners’ needs in the development of improved safety training for prison st

Read ACT In Practice: Case Conceptualization in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. This book details the ACT model and describes how to accomplish case conceptualizations from an ACT perspective, offering a précis of the literature that establish the importance and value of case conceptualization. Exercises throughout help you to evaluate the information you have just learned so that you may effectively integrate ACT into your practice. Supporting Children's Learning: Code of Practice explains the new duties of local authorities and other agencies to support children's and young people's learning under the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004 as amended. Progress in implementing the Act In chapter 9, we set out the enablers we will need to work on in the first year to drive forward progress on the actions in this strategy. This includes improving autism data collection and reporting across government, which will be important in determining our progress towards our vision for 2026. In addition, we are committing to improve research on the barriers people face and the interventions that work for autistic people. The implementation plan (Annex A) sets out the actions we will take within the first year of the strategy. The actions we commit to will lay the foundations for what we aim to achieve over the course of the next 5 years. We will refresh this plan for subsequent years, in line with future Spending Review rounds. Our short video gives you an overview of the ACT Awareness e-learning, the sort of content it covers and the style and format of the learning. And all in just over a minute.Over the last few years, we have seen many public sector services and organisations taking steps to become autism-inclusive, with many becoming autism-accredited or taking other steps to improve how they support autistic people. However, we know that many autistic people still feel excluded from public spaces and civil society because these can be overwhelming, busy or noisy and because staff or the public may react negatively to autistic people’s behaviour or support needs. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic autistic adults reported higher levels of loneliness than the general public. Evidence from the LSE research we commissioned into the impact of the pandemic has shown that autistic people may be at risk of further exclusion, due to the challenges many have faced with social distancing restrictions and changes to support networks. This has affected their confidence with getting out into their communities. The National Autistic Society Left Stranded report found that compared to the general public, autistic people were seven times more likely to be chronically lonely during June and July 2020. By 2026, we will have made headway on reducing the health and care inequalities autistic people face, and show that autistic people are living healthier lives. This includes evidencing that we are making progress on improving autistic people’s health outcomes and reducing the gap in life expectancy.