#12 AST updates and neurodiversity

Last Updated on April 27, 2021 by Steph Reed Well the past few months have been, I don’t know how to describe it… absolutely crazy! It’s been very strange, difficult and challenging. There’s been highs. There’s been lows. But fundamentally, things have changed. Things are different. Things are uncertain. I know that we’ve all had our own experience and our own journey and our own challenges. So I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well during this pandemic.If you have your own children, I hope that you are all in one piece and that you have managed to have some kind of quality time together. If you’re a key worker, we love you!Parents, we love you! Teachers, we love you. Thank you to everybody!Now things for myself, and Autism Spectrum Teacher (which is myself!) have been very challenging because like perhaps yourself or others you know, I was without any work. My work before the COVID-19 pandemic was in schools, supporting staff, families, SENCO”S and teachers, developing SEND provision and practice.Of course, then schools closed and I was unable to support the schools, and families in the same way that I would have done before. Now, we’ve all been managing the best that we could from a distance. To a point that’s helping some people, but of course I wanted to do more and essentially, I needed to keep everything that Autism Spectrum Teacher and myself does including all of the projects and this podcast. This is the reason why I’ve had to put the podcast on hold for the past couple of months. Without those means of ensuring stability for the podcast, I couldn’t continue it. However, I have some plans and I have put things in motion. I want to tell you all about the future plans!We’ve all had to adapt, right? And to be honest, I’ve been really pleased with how some of the children have adapted! You know, sometimes we really do fear the worst don’t we!? Of course there have been many challenges and a lot more challenges I would say, but we’ve got to stick to the positive here. There have been some children that have really surprised us. Now, this episode and the next seven podcast episodes are going to sound very different to previous episodes.There is a theme that will be running through this and the next seven podcasts. And that is that… I’m very pleased and proud to announce that… I have released a series of online training courses, which gives a lot of concise and digestible information as well as practical strategies and how to apply these in real day life.There’s a lot of information out there, but I’ve designed these courses to give you the key information, how to do different types of strategies in order so that you can go away and apply them straight away,