Autism team at DMU named best in the country

The team at De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) which supports people with autism has been named the best in the country.

For providing a full and innovative range of help, including weekly social events, drop-in support sessions, and residential placements to help students transition into and out of university, the autism team at DMU has been named The National Association of Disability Practitioners (NADP) Service Team of the Year for 2023.

The NADP promotes high quality, sustainable and inclusive post-16 provision for disabled students in higher and further education.

Clare Squires, disability officer for autism at DMU, said the whole team – which also includes Adam Davison, Lee Atkinson and Tabitha Biller – said she was proud of the win. 

She said: “We are so proud to have won this award in recognition of our sector leading support for autistic students.

“We are so grateful to our students for supporting all our activities and events; for letting us know what they like and don’t like so that we can constantly improve our services and make them the best that they possibly can be.”

NADP judges picked out particular elements of the team’s overall care when outlining why they had chose DMU for the win.

These included a weekly programme of events for autistic students including life hacks sessions, lunchtime socials, mindfulness sessions and a social night every week.

They also praised the structure of care, in how the team’s work spans the whole student life cycle from the point students start planning to come to university to when they are preparing to graduate and move into life after DMU. This the team call ‘transition care’.

Those autistic students planning to come to DMU are offered a two-day residential event, fully planned and catered, which sees the DMU autism team spend the night in student accommodation with applicants. 

This event allays applicants’ and parents’ anxieties about starting university; it enables applicants to feel familiar with campus; helps to build relationships with the team, and with each other prior to joining DMU.

Then in students’ final year, the team run Future Proofing sessions, which cover all aspects of planning for life after DMU: job hunting, accommodation, creating a new support network.

There is also an eight-week collaboration between DMU's careers and autism teams, combining their expertise to guide autistic students through the recruitment process to reduce anxiety about the unknown and be better able understand how the recruitment process works.  It covers how to search for jobs, how to write letters of application, what to expect in psychometric testing, mock interviews using virtual reality headsets.