Mr. Adam Harris:

Teacher training is a source of enormous frustration for everybody. This point was raised when the representatives of the teachers' unions were before the committee. There is agreement across the board about how important it is. When we come to teacher training and autism, it is yet another example of the point I made a moment ago to Senator Ardagh that there has been a reluctance to grasp the nettle and recognise that teachers of autistic people need very specific training. Sometimes there is an adage used in education that good teaching is good teaching, if one likes, but what people need to understand is that communicating and interacting with an autistic person for a neurotypical teacher is often counter-intuitive. A very simple thing is how a teacher knows a student is listening. He or she might check if the student is making eye contact. An autistic student might need to look away in order to hear what the teacher is saying. There is such a counter-intuitive way of communicating that the teacher might need to learn about. We are concerned that it should be part of initial teacher education. Whatever about having a transition time, we are seeing teachers come out of college now who tell us that they had a couple of lectures on autism and that was really it.

I encourage the committee to consider in the coming period the fact that Mary Immaculate College, at its second campus in Thurles, has a compulsory module in autism in the final year of the degree. It is the only teacher training college that has done that. There is a success story there that should be rolled out. Dr. Finn Ó Murchú is the principal there and he has been leading the work. That is something to look at as a model.

What is also important is the ongoing development of the teacher. AsIAm has developed an autism-friendly schools programme that we had evaluated last year. Some 350 schools came to us and they completed a tool that shows them their areas of strength and their areas of development. They have online training on an introductory level that every teacher in the school can do. Then they nominate one mainstream and one special education teacher to come to three CPD days over the course of the year, where they access master classes and meet other schools. It is a real community of practice. That is something that we would like to scale and expand, but at the moment we are operating at a loss because nobody is providing something similar. We need funding at different levels, but initial teacher education should have a compulsory component around autism. The module in Mary Immaculate College in Thurles is definitely something that the committee should consider looking at further.