PDSS is the Physical Difficulties Support Service in Birmingham. We would like to let you know about the latest PDNet competition. Details below: HOW DO I ENTER? Please email your entry to emma.sheasby@sdsa.net and make sure you include your name, age, school and contact details. If you are aged under 16, please ask a parent […]
PDSS is the Physical Difficulties Support Service in Birmingham. We would like to let you know about PDNet which is a free to join, national network that provides professionals in education with support in promoting positive outcomes for children and young people with a physical disability. We have a strong commitment to developing and sharing […]
Getting back to school, following the restrictions due to the COVID-19 crisis, is going to be tricky for many children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. In Birmingham, we have been keeping in touch with our SEND Youth Forum members to ask them their views about learning during lockdown and their ideas […]
There are around 700,00 people in the UK with an Autism diagnosis, that is more than 1 in 100. For those of us in educational settings it is important for us to have an awareness of Autism and knowledge of how this affects individuals we might have in our settings and classrooms. An increasing amount […]
The Coronavirus has forced us all to work in different ways. The Communication and Autism Team (CAT) in Birmingham have risen to the challenge to support the families of children and young people on our caseload. In normal circumstances, we mainly work with pupils within their school environment. However, many of our caseload pupils are […]
Birmingham has a wide and varied population, and is home to a diverse mixture of communities from around the world. Autism is a condition found across all cultures, therefore it is essential that awareness is raised amongst all communities, in order to promote a factual understanding of, and empathy for, autistic people. For the last […]
In 2011, the Communication & Autism Team (CAT) began working in with the Autism Education Trust (AET). As a regional training hub for the AET’s programmes of training, CAT specialists worked with schools to implement the National Autism Standards and Competencies within all the State Funded schools in Birmingham. AET training programmes cover three age […]
The new AET Good Autism Practice Report 2019 consists of a set of guidelines written by members of the Autism Centre of Education and Research (ACER) at Birmingham University. The guidelines have been generated from a review of the research evidence, current policy documents, expert opinion, statutory guidance and from the views of autistic people. […]
The special educational needs and disability (SEND) code of practice (2015), states that ‘A pupil has SEN where their learning difficulty or disability calls for special educational provision, that is different from or additional to that normally available to pupils of the same age’. To ensure that every child or young person gets the support […]
Welcome to our first blog! We hope you like our new look site which has been redesigned to ensure that it is easy to navigate and to find the information you are looking for. We’ve opened up many of our existing resources to everyone who visits the site. These can now be found in the […]