Government publishes new National Strategy for autistic children, young people and adults:

Last week the Government published its long lobbied for, Autism Strategy, which sets out how it plans to support autistic adults and children in England over the next five years.  We really welcome this!  In summary they intend to:

• invest £10.5 million into finding new ways to reduce diagnosis waiting times for children and young people
• invest £2.5 million to improve the quality of adult diagnostic and post-diagnostic pathways and diagnosis waiting times 
• increase public understanding of autism with a long-term, nationwide initiative
• provide £18.5 million to prevent autistic people from falling into mental health crisis and £21 million to local authorities to help people move from inpatient units back into the community
• improve autism understanding among education professionals, job centre staff and frontline staff in the justice system.

• more autistic people to have jobs. 
• to help autistic people who have jobs, to keep them by improving the help autistic people can get to find and stay in jobs, and  
• to improve help for autistic people who can’t work, so they can live well. 

• By helping businesses understand autism, so they are able to give jobs to autistic people.  (Something we already work hard to do through our on the ground support to employers and our Disability Awareness Training Courses.)
• By making training and Jobcentres more accessible to help autistic people find jobs. 
• By continuing the Access to Work scheme.  Which provides  financial support to disabled people when they find a job, by way of a Job Coach, work placed adjustments and in some cases support with travel.

Of course Ways into Work has been providing support to hundreds of clients with autism for many years, through the funding we've secured from Local Authorities and grant funders.  We know the 'supported employment' model works as we had already reached the Government's 2015 target to halve the disability employment gap by 2027, many years ago and we continue to work hard to change lives, one job at a time. Find out more about Autism and employment here. 

If you are a Job Seeker you can check out if you are eligible for our support here and if you are an Employer who needs support to diversify your workforce we would love to hear from you - please get in touch. 

You can read the Strategy paper here and see more from The National Autistic Society who have been fierce campaigners in increasing funding.