Greeny News

autistic adolescents and Danny Hornby have nowhere to go when they leave school. A new campaign aims to develop services that, after 19 open life chances and opportunities for all

Virginia Bovell

When he realized that there were no schools that offer intensive support doctors said his three year old son with autism need again in 1997, met with four other families and create a special school that offers intensive autism-specific education.

Fourteen years later, Treehouse, the school was set up in north London, is internationally recognized as a model of how children with autism must be taught.

Bovell

But recently faced a new challenge.

his son, Danny 18, is about to leave school and was looking for a place for him to continue his education. Dismayed by the quality of what is offered to autistic children after school, once again, joined forces with other parents to campaign for a radical improvement.

A report next week on the ambitious autism charity Treehouse aligned to school, found that only 19% of children with autism continue any education after leaving school, and concludes that it is because there are very few schools equipped to accommodate them. Approximately 85% of adults with autism do not have jobs.

The report, completed in school: What's next for young people with autism? said. "Families often believe that there is no place for young people with autism to go once they have finished school"

The majority of autistic children deal with what he describes as

Bovell premature "retirement" in his teens with the opportunity to live at home with their parents for the rest of his life, will live in a housing (of which there are very few), or spend time in day care centers, often full of people who are two or three times her age.

Without continued support, the skills children have learned to be missed, resulting in a "huge loss of funds," the charity of the state.

"the dedicated staff that one of the saddest, most frustrating aspects of her job is to put all this effort and see all these advances to a young school and were then makes it absolutely heartbreaking to see that nothing was available then, "says Bovell.

"Hearing of adults with autism who can not access learning opportunities after school is desperately depressing."

if his campaign is focused on improving opportunities for young people with autism, the results of charity resonate with parents of children with other disabilities, who often find that the State support throughout childhood is replaced by a black hole once they reach 16.

"When we started, one of the reasons why there were very few services that people were still working on a prevalence rate of four or five per 10 000, is now widely recognized that the spectrum of Autism affects 1% [of children], "says Bovell.

"Nobody knows if it's nothing more to do with better diagnosis or an actual increase in prevalence. However, autism is a disease of low incidence, we can ignore. It there should be more services. The activists spoke of a time bomb for some time, noting that if the number of children that come through education, where adult services will wake up? "

Charity is the development of plans with a number of further education colleges to support young people with autism to continue their education. There is no autism specific school in London and the charity wants to change that.