Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training Learning Disability and Autism

youtu.be/ouhKSOGm49g

I think this has just turned into a big thing, someone is going to have to delivery this training, and the preference for these role are going to need to have lived experience with autism. This is hundreds of jobs..

NAS80540 said:

Saying that, I am very happy they have done this training as its all a step forward and I'm not complaining really just think we can still be critical and discuss things like this else how do things ever improve.

I have done the training I agree it’s a good starting point for the masses but can definitely be built on. I was also pleased this afternoon to see my Trust now has a neurodiversity staff network alongside the disability network, I think they were previously combined 

Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful answer :). You are right it's not geared towards to be about a proportion of autistic people. As always with these things its a step in the right direction but more should be done really. 

I guess one of my annoyances in 'autism training' in general is they often only show people in videos who 'look disabled' on the outside. I.e. they're in a wheelchair or they have specific and/or obvious speech difference. This one was better in that it had a small section where it showed someone who said it can look 'invisible' in some settings. I just feel sometimes the need to do this just perpetuates that people need to 'look autistic' whatever that means.

Saying that, I am very happy they have done this training as its all a step forward and I'm not complaining really just think we can still be critical and discuss things like this else how do things ever improve.

NAS80540 said:

I feel this inability to understand abstract concepts is not very accurate for a lot of autistics and just wanted to hear others thoughts and feelings on it.

I had a long conversation with my therapist about this some time ago as I had said I was not very creative with original thinking (ie brand new ideas) but was extremely adept at re-structuring something or improvising solutions with the things at hand.

She said this was a classic autistic trait and one that has led to a great many inventors through history turning out to be autistic (a bit hard to prove in retrospect).

I looked up evidence for this corrollation and evidence is there but it has not been researched that thoroughly yet.

Psychology Today talk about mind types for autist having a Systemizing Mechanism for thought processing:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/autism-and-invention/202109/is-there-link-between-autism-and-the-capacity-invention

The Systemizing Mechanism allowed humans to look for special patterns in the world, which I call "if-and- then" patterns. These are the basis of any system. If I take something, and I do something to it, then I get an outcome

It appears we can take existing ideas and rework them by using the what-if process to form variations on these ideas and keep on with the process until we have something that looks completely different but still "works".

In the absence of proper studies in the area I guess it is just conjecture though.

Autism is such a wide spectrum!  "Not understanding abstract concepts " clearly does not apply to all of us. I am doing a MSc in Psychology at the moment, and have taken a few minutes off from working on a cognitive psychology essay, so this is timely.

Vygotsky theorized that concept formation starts with random information, which we then try to put into some sort of meaningful order by using categories. He argued that these become complex pseudo-concepts and we fit new information into categories. He hypothesised a "zone of proximal development", the area between what we already know and what we need to know; he described "scaffolding" as where a trainer or teacher helps to express the ideas as complete concepts. According to Vygotsky, this process starts in infancy and has some similarities to Piaget's theory of development from concrete to formal abstract thinking.

Kelly wrote about personal construct theory. I don't know if there has been any comparison between autistic and allistic individuals in terms of how we formulate constructs, which are essentially high-level concepts.

If you think about it, abstract concepts can be quite basic, e.g. the colour "red" is a concept ... it is a categorisation that applies to, say, tomatoes, a stop light, a guardsman's uniform ... most kids get the idea of colours in nursery, including autistic kids. Most kids have a concept of "fairness" which is quite an abstract idea. How many times do we hear kids and adults say "That's not fair"?

If one looks at the history of the Oliver McGowan Training, Oliver was a very needy young person who was autistic and also had learning difficulties. I think the training is geared more towards autistic people who have significant care needs, and may have limited capacity (in terms of the Mental Capacity Act.) We need those who care for vulnerable individuals to be trained, and this is a worthy attempt at doing just that.

The training is designed for a general audience including care workers. Many care workers have minimal formal training - we are talking NVQ2. The aim is to teach general principles. To use an analogy, this is akin to a four-hour  "responsible person" first aid training course, not a three-day first aid at work certificate, and certainly not training to be a paramedic!

I am an autistic university lecturer, and I worked with an autistic professor. But I don't think that our "flavour" of autism is what this training is about. If I am teaching about autism to social worker students I am usually more nuanced in my approach than if I am working with TAs in a school ... it about providing information appropriate to individual responsibilities.

Having briefly looked through the Oliver McGowan trainers' manual it is easy to pick on generalisations and simplifications. The point is that finally, the Government has recognised that knowledge of autism needs to be part of the training for health and care workers at all levels. Hopefully as the course rolls out and trainers get more feedback it will improve over time.

I think there are many aspects of autism that are not well understood and certainly not well understood outside of perhaps a few 'experts'.  That most who work in the field have never experienced what it is like to be autistic and autistic people do not experience what it is like to not be autistic makes it a challenge to understand the differences.