Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to ensure that all teachers in England are able to understand and respond to the needs of pupils with an autism spectrum disorder.

The Department has contracted with the Autism Education Trust since 2012 to deliver autism training to education staff. To date, the Trust has trained over 90,000 education staff. This training will continue to be funded in 2016-2017 to a value of £750,000. The contract extension with the Autism Education Trust will build on previous grant funding from the Department for two other projects (2013-16): a project by the National Autistic Society to provide information and advice to parents and professionals on exclusions and a project by Ambitious about Autism on strategies for supporting transition from school to college.

Our support also includes the National Association for Special Educational Needs’ Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Gateway (www.sendgateway.org.uk).This offers education professionals free, easy access to high quality information, resources and training for meeting the needs of children with SEND, including those with autism. The Department has also funded National Association for Special Educational Needs (2015-16) to develop a free universal offer of SEND Continuous Professional Development for teachers.

The National College for Teaching and Leadership has produced a series of specialist online courses, one of which focuses on autism. The training materials are designed to support teachers in mainstream schools who want to improve their skills in teaching pupils with SEND. The training materials can be found at: www.education.gov.uk/lamb.

In order to be awarded qualified teacher status, trainees must satisfy the Teachers’ Standards, which include a requirement that they have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with SEND, and are able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support them.

Following Sir Andrew Carter’s independent review of the quality and effectiveness of Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses, the Secretary of State appointed an independent working group made up of expert representatives from the sector to develop a framework of core ITT content. The working group includes two SEND experts and will consider Sir Andrew’s recommendations on the SEND content of the proposed framework. The group is expected to report to DfE in spring 2016.