Mr. Adam Harris:

I wish to pick up on Deputy Martin's point on training. One aspect can be considered in terms of whole-school training. Certainly, we are looking at this approach in the context of our modules. We need to consider the roll-out of child protection training this year by the Teaching Council. The council created an online module that teachers were able to access. That could then feed in to a staff meeting for reflective time. That might be an efficient way of doing it. It might work around the difficulties of substitution.

The Middletown Centre for Autism provides expert training. Aside from the individual work carried out one-to-one with students the centre does a great deal of work training teachers and parents. Much of that is valuable within schools. It may be worth engaging with the centre at some stage and perhaps inviting representatives to speak to the committee.

I wish to make two final points picking up on the discourse. The first relates to sensory processing, which has been mentioned numerous times. Significant work remains to be done on the sensory accessibility of schools, especially new school buildings. I visit many schools in the course of my work. I find that new schools are less sensory-friendly than older buildings because they are large buildings that echo with large open spaces where people congregate in multi-purpose spaces. This area needs to be looked at. The sensory world is sometimes addressed as a fluffy issue but in fact it is fundamental to an autistic person being able to participate.

The question of the use of restraint needs to be looked at urgently, especially documentation and monitoring. Let us suppose we were talking about neuro-typical students and incidents involving a teacher using physical restraint but they were not being documented and not always explainable. I believe we would be talking about referral to the Teaching Council for that sort of behaviour. It is concerning that we do not have the same concern because it relates to students on the autism spectrum. Perhaps we simply presume that it must be the student whose behaviour warrants it. This area needs to be looked at.