We're moving offices
Our SEND Outreach Services have moved to Discovery School, West Thamesmead. Thank you for your patience during the relocation process, we look forward to welcoming you to our new space soon.
Our autism outreach workers are specialist teaching assistants. They directly support schools using a shadowed working or training approach such as:
- modelling interventions and strategies
- setting aims with the school
We deliver formal training through teachers, the speech and language therapist or outreach workers as appropriate. All our courses, except for Attention Autism, are free for schools.
We can also train the whole school on site for programmes like ASD awareness or ASD for mealtime supervisors.
Contact Autism Outreach
Telephone: 020 8921 3311
Email: autism-outreach@royalgreenwich.gov.uk
Address:
Discovery School
Battery Road,
West Thamesmead
London SE28 0JN
Read about our approach to supporting children and young people with autism:
Find more resources for schools and nurseries
Download forms and templates to use at schools
Strategies to use at school
You can help your students by:
- applying routine, structure and consistency
- preparing for any changes
- adapting your communication to use shorter sentences and emphasising key words
- giving children processing time to respond to you (we suggest up to 10 seconds)
- using visual supports such as gestures, pictures and symbols to back-up communication
- supporting children to have their own means of communication, even if they do not have language
- being aware of children's sensory needs and trying to meet them, not stop them
- being aware of anything the child finds triggering and planning for this
- motivating and rewarding desired behaviour – reprimands are rarely as effective
Visual processing
You can help a student with their visual processing by:
- building up the sides of a desk with cardboard to block out distracting stimuli
- keeping visual and auditory distractions (such as wall displays) to a minimum to help focus their attention
- seating them beside the teacher to help them attend to directions and tasks
- using different colours for different lines on the board