Community consultation open for Draft National Guidance

Hello everyone, my name is Professor Dawn Adams and I work at La Trobe University. For the past few months I've been working with a group of people on an Autism CRC project funded by the Australian Government. We've been working together to identify the things that can be done to make school better for autistic young people.

We've collected a lot of evidence. We've read over 500 research articles and we've heard the perspectives of more than 800 autistic and autism community members. We'd like to thank every single person who's already taken part and shared their views and their experience. We've listened to all of this experience, we've read all the research and we've brought that together to write a set of recommendations. But these are things that schools and early childcare settings can be done to support inclusive education for autistic students. We're calling a set of recommendations the National Guidance. And now, we'd like your views on what we've included.

If you'd like to review the National Guidance, you can download the document from the website and you can find the link to our online survey. You can choose to answer and give feedback on specific recommendations or on the general section. There are four sections in the document and you can provide feedback on one or all of them. If you choose to give feedback on a specific recommendation, you'll be asked questions about the clarity of that recommendation, the feasibility or how possible it is that schools could implement that. The potential impact it might have, and any concerns you can see with that recommendation. There's also an option at the end of a form to tell us any more feedback or anything you'd like us to know.

In the survey, you have a few options of how you can respond. You can type your answers, or you can voice record you speaking, or you can upload a creative response. It's absolutely fine to skip questions. You can save or return to the survey at a later point and you can exit the survey. If you want to withdraw your data, just type "Withdraw" and we'll remove your data and won't use it.

If you have any questions about the survey, there's an email address. So please just email and it will get sent to the right person in the project team. Thanks very much for listening. And we look forward to hearing your views on our National Guidance and helping shape this to improve inclusive education for autistic students across Australia.

Thank you.