Autism

The Autism skills and knowledge list sets out the skills and knowledge adult social care workers need to deliver high quality care and support for autistic people. 

Care workers can use it to see if they have the right skills and knowledge. 

It will also be useful for people who are arranging or providing training to workers.

Please note, we're working with the National Autistic Society, Skills for Health and Opening Minds Training and Consultancy to develop a new autism core capabilities framework. The framework in scheduled for completion by the end of June 2019. If you'd like to review the draft framework or get involved in an interview, register your interest here. 

Our Autism awareness learning resources lists training materials that have been developed by a range of organisations in the sector. The materials can help you to increase awareness and understanding of autism, so that your workforce better recognise and respond to the needs of autistic people.

Here are some other resources we've developed. 

• How to do a great assessment for someone who has autism will be useful for social workers, community care assessors, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and other health professionals, including those who are working to assess people for benefit claims. It will provide these workers with the knowledge to undertake assessments with autistic people. 
  
  
• How to be a great autistic individual employer is for autistic individual employers who are employing a personal assistant(s) for themselves or on behalf of an autistic person.
  
  
• How to be a great personal assistant for someone with autism is for personal assistants who are providing care and support for an autistic person.

Everyone has the right to have meaningful personal relationships, including people with learning disabilities and/ or autistic people.

It’s vital that adult social care workers have the right values, skills and knowledge to support people with personal relationships – and training is a vital part of this.

This guidance helps employers to think about how they can develop their staff through training. It explains what workers need to know and understand about personal relationships, and how you can create a workforce development programme. 

This research report (published in December 2018) explores the adult social care workforce supporting people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people, using data from the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care. 

Here are some of the key findings. 

• There were an estimated 665,000 jobs in the learning disabilities and/or autism workforce. 
• 57,600 workers were in the local authority sector and 575,000 were in the independent sector. 

Download the full report here.