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Community issues and AS

longman

How effectively is autism and aspergers represented in community forums at local authority level?

There are a lot of fora that deal with equality issues across a spectrum of subjects, some quite unusual but important nonetheless, that are addressed at local council level to ensure different groups have a say in policy decisions affecting communities. These include things like disability and housing, disability disclosure in relation to housing services and adult support, social, sport and entertainment access in relation to disability.

They are used to air and gauge public response to policy changes and new systems.

Many groups send representatives to these. In my experience autism is seldom represented. This seems to be because the main local autism groups are around children and dealt with through specific meetings. Lack of resources to provide people and lack of identified need to address adult needs seem to be prominent reasons for non-representation.

I've done a lot of this over the years (committees get me out and involved, as long as they are civilised and well-managed as my heatring and speech coordination suffers when lots of people are talking at once).

When I can I try to speak up for autism issues where relevant, but I'm not representing anyone. I feel that autism isn't being picked up where it should be because of this lack of representation, for example funding opportunities ior changes to services that could have a knock on effect on people on the spectrum.

Is there any strategy for improving the visibility of autism at local authority level?

Parents

  • I've continued to chase my local authority on its response to "Leading Rewarding and Fulfilling Lives.

    The latest I have from them is a letter pointing out the results of the Initial Findings report by the Learning Disabilities Observatory, which looks at the regional variations in whether local authorities have graded their responses to the self-assessment form green, amber or red.

    They are quite cocky that they've performed better than average for the number of questions they rated green or amber.

    However they aren't implementing separate provisions for people on the autistic spectrum. Rather they are using their existing Learning Disabilities Partnership Board to provide for people on the spectrum ONLY if they have a learning disability. They confess to having little understanding of autism needs.

    This from a local authority that declared in response to the December 2010 NAS questionnaire that they would have an Autism Partnership Board by the summer of 2011 and also all their training underway. Whereas they haven't done any training but have made most of their autism team redundant! 

    So in consequence, they were not entitled to give green or amber answers to any of their questions. Indeed they are probably amongst the worst respondents.

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  • I've continued to chase my local authority on its response to "Leading Rewarding and Fulfilling Lives.

    The latest I have from them is a letter pointing out the results of the Initial Findings report by the Learning Disabilities Observatory, which looks at the regional variations in whether local authorities have graded their responses to the self-assessment form green, amber or red.

    They are quite cocky that they've performed better than average for the number of questions they rated green or amber.

    However they aren't implementing separate provisions for people on the autistic spectrum. Rather they are using their existing Learning Disabilities Partnership Board to provide for people on the spectrum ONLY if they have a learning disability. They confess to having little understanding of autism needs.

    This from a local authority that declared in response to the December 2010 NAS questionnaire that they would have an Autism Partnership Board by the summer of 2011 and also all their training underway. Whereas they haven't done any training but have made most of their autism team redundant! 

    So in consequence, they were not entitled to give green or amber answers to any of their questions. Indeed they are probably amongst the worst respondents.

Children
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