Many people don't know much about autism until someone autistic comes into  their lives. Understanding about what autism is, and isn't, will help you feel more confident about supporting your child, and help you to support them to develop, understand themselves and be happy and mentally well. 

You can book sessions with me for personalised information and learning about autism relevant to you and your family.

Meeting other parents can be helpful for sharing ideas and experiences, mutual support and feeling heard and like someone "gets" you. Attending a parents group can help you feel more connected.

I run a structured 8 week online parent information courses, as well as a rolling group of shorter sessions that covers the same information in bite sized chunks. 

Parents and carers are usually the people with the most opportunities to support their children. I can teach you skills that can help promote speech, language and social communication development for your child. We can work out what goals to aim for together and look at ways to achieve these. I can also help you understand more about how communication skills develop.

I offer parent sessions for problem solving. We focus on understanding and developing strategies together to help you and your child with things causing particular difficulties (e.g. getting ready for school / managing overload / supporting interactions with siblings... )

I can support you to explore ways to get your child's needs met in school. I can attend meetings, observe in school, and work with teachers, assistants and SENCOs. I can contribute to IEPs, My Plans and EHCP applications (documents schools use to plan and monitor how your child is supported).

I encourage a focus on how school can change the environment to make it possible for the child to feel OK, engage and thrive, not just on what teachers want the child to do in school. 

For some children, school or nursery is a good place for 1:1 therapy sessions as it is somewhere they are familiar with, and it allows the work we do in sessions to be more directly relevant to their daily life. With the child and your consent I can liaise with school regularly about how sessions are going. This can help to get crossover of what we have been focussing on in sessions into school life.