Language & Cognition seminar - Dr Laura Crane & Norah Richards

Facilitating the voices of autistic young people with complex needs: a participatory study in a specialist residential school

In this talk, CRAE’s Laura Crane will discuss the current landscape of autism research in the UK, with an emphasis on the need for research that is inclusive of a broader range of autistic people and genuinely makes a difference to their day-to-day lives. Laura will propose that one way to achieve this goal is through participatory approaches. As such, Laura will discuss an innovative school-researcher partnership model (the Pan London Autism Schools Network, PLASN), which was developed to facilitate more impactful and inclusive school-based autism research. Laura will then co-present with Norah Richards, a practitioner-researcher who was previously based at one of the PLASN schools, Prior’s Court (a specialist residential school for autistic young people with complex needs). Prior’s Court identified pupil voice as a priority for action within the school, with Laura and Norah conducting an action research study to develop and evaluate a supportive way to elicit and document pupil voice.  In this seminar, they will describe and discuss their research, which addresses the following question: how we can truly know what a young person wants, if nobody confidently speaks their language?