We are extremely excited that the Department for Education has extended our contract for another two years until April 2020.

At a time of funding challenges, DfE’s backing is a valuable recognition of the importance of our work. Thanks to the DfE’s ongoing commitment and financial support we can ensure that all our training materials and resources are continuously updated in line with the latest research. We just finished updating our early years and post 16 training materials, these are already available to all our training partners.

The AET’s programme and all its content is founded on research we have previously commissioned into good autism practice. Some of that research has evolved and we are therefore updating our good practice research this year.

Two years ago, we launched our AET schools autism progression framework to support schools and school staff in assessing, planning and evaluating children’s progress’ in areas of personal development outside of the national curriculum. The framework has proven to be hugely popular and, after a review of its use last year, our partners at Autism Associates are further developing this resource to reflect feedback from the review and to make it relevant to all children and young people from 0 to 25. We also hope to integrate it into a more user-friendly software application to include some additional functionalities. Watch this space.

DfE’s support also enables the us to continue our training programme, benefiting an increasing numbers of local authorities, education practitioners and all settings from 0-25. Our goal is to establish partnerships in all local authority areas. Working towards this goal also enables us to create a more sustainable business model to ensure that we can continue to support the education community in the long term.