Ms Elaine Jenkins:

I want to go back to Deputy Tully's point on staff training. We are really in the middle of a perfect storm at the moment, because we have a combination of no staff training and no therapists. When my son was diagnosed eight years ago, we had some access to speech and occupational therapy. There was a plan at that stage. When he started school, the teachers had somebody to refer to around his sensory needs. He had a sensory programme. Now, there is nobody in our Children's Disability Network teams, CDNTs, to see those children. They do not know them in school, they do not know them starting school, they do not know them as they grow up, and the teachers are not trained to understand the absolute depths of the behaviour, of how to teach these children to communicate or how to manage their sensory needs. It is not really about education or health. The two matters are absolutely knotted together, for life, but we are in a very bad place at the moment when the teachers do not understand the behaviours that are arriving into these many autism classes.