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The team at Â鶹ӰԺ Leicester (Â鶹ӰԺ) 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 Â鶹ӰԺ 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 Â鶹ӰԺ, 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 Â鶹ӰԺ 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 Â鶹ӰԺ. This the team call ‘transition care’.

Those autistic students planning to come to Â鶹ӰԺ are offered a two-day residential event, fully planned and catered, which sees the Â鶹ӰԺ 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 Â鶹ӰԺ.

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

There is also an eight-week collaboration between Â鶹ӰԺ'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.