Improving the mental health of autistic and ADHD students at school

This online free training is aimed at school staff with pastoral responsibility for neurodivergent young people including teachers, head of year, SENDCos, senior leadership team, teaching assistants and school nurses.

This training will cover:

• What is autism and ADHD
• Upsetting experiences at school and emotional responses in neurodivergent students
• Links between neurodivergence, mental health and school attendance
• Interventions to reduce upsetting experiences at school and reduce their negative impact (reducing emotional burden) in order to improve mental health, attainment and attendance

Speaker Profiles

Dr Camilla Parker is a researcher and psychiatry doctor with a special interest the mental health of autistic and ADHD young people. She has worked at City & Hackney specialist CAMHS Neurodevelopmental Team in the Autism and ADHD service and conducts youth mental health research at the Youth Resilience Unit, Queen Mary University of London. She is currently undertaking research as part of the RE-STAR program exploring school staff’s perspectives on school emotional burden in autistic and/or ADHD young people with school attendance problems.

Amy Edwards is a researcher at DECIPHer, a public health research centre at Cardiff University, working primarily on interventions, evaluations and coproduction of research within secondary and primary schools, and with non-mainstream education settings in Wales to explore health and wellbeing priority setting. Amy’s recent research on RE-STAR has focussed on the experiences of Autistic and ADHD young people in school settings. A former teacher in the post-16 education sector, Amy has extensive experience in translating research to the teacher experience within the classroom and the more wider school setting. As a parent of a neurodivergent child, Amy has lived experience of working with schools and agencies to support neurodivergent young people.

For further information about the RE-STAR study see: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/re-star

Host institution

The Youth Resilience Unit (YRU) is funded by Barts Charity and commenced its work on 1st March 2021. It is housed within the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary University of London. The overall aim of the YRU is to study how young people use resources in the community to overcome mental distress.

The YRU is currently based at the Newham Centre for Mental Health (London, UK). It seeks collaboration both with the mental health services and organisations for young people in the community outside formal health services. Key research areas include: emotional disorders, loneliness, self-harm, suicide, and global mental health.

You can follow the activities of the YRU on Twitter (@QMULResilience). For more information about the YRU and contact details, please visit our website.

Host or Publisher Youth Resilience Research Unit - Queen Mary University of London