Aadvanced Solutions support:
Please find attached a folder with further information on each topic listed below:
Supporting you to find the answers around:
ADHD
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that affects the way the brain process information and it can impact on learning, relationships and behaviour.
Every brain is different and people with ADHD will all have different strengths and challenges. Often someone with ADHD can be taking in and processing everything around them at once, finding it hard to filter information and focus on a specific task or conversation. Individuals with ADHD may seem easily distracted, restless, fidgety, forgetful or wander off topic and can have difficulty concentrating. There is an element of impulsivity that can lead those with ADHD to act before thinking and can mean that they can be easily led.
Children and young people with ADHD are often misunderstood as being poorly behaved they can be incorrectly branded as disruptive, rude, disorganised or day dreamers and these negative perceptions can be demoralising and lead to low self esteem, poor mental health and undesirable outcomes.
With the right support, people with ADHD can be great multitaskers, creative thinkers and able to process lots of information quickly, they can have have high levels of energy and resilience. Having learned about their own triggers and built strategies to self regulate, those who have ADHD can be very self aware, open to feedback and great at honest conversations.
Autism
Autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that can be recognised from early childhood. Each autistic person will have their own individual strengths and challenges.
Autistic people will have some challenges around social interaction and communication. For some, there may be limited or no spoken communication but often the challenges can present difficulties in understanding others' intentions, social cues, body language and/or facial expressions. Social interactions can be hard work for autistic people.
There is usually a "preference for sameness" and a tendency for restricted or repetitive patterns of thought or behaviour, this can present in several different ways. Repetition and familiarity can be comforting and help to manage anxiety. Unexpected changes or breaks from familiar routine can be difficult and an autistic person might need longer to process these.
Autistic people often have sensory differences and can experience sound, smells, sight, taste and touch so acutely that this can be really overwhelming at times.
It is common for autistic people to have specific strengths and abilities around pattern recognition and memory (especially visual), they can be creative and visual thinkers. When a subject or field is found to be of particular interest, and an autistic person can apply these strengths, they can be incredibly successful due the ability to hyper-focus and see all the detail.
Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Michelangelo, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, Temple Grandin are all known or thought to be autistic.
Sensory Processing Difficulties
Sensory Processing is how we all understand the world around us and how the information that we take in through our senses is sent to our brain.
Sensory Processing is our nervous system taking in information from all of our eight senses and determining how safe or comfortable we feel at any given time. We all have individual differences in our sensory processing - determining how spicy we like our food or the volume we choose to listen to music for example. But for many neurodivergent people, sensory information is processed very differently and this can impact their sense of safety and comfort more quickly or more slowly than usual, sometimes leading to quite extreme over or under responses. For example, the smell of a particular food might make someone physically sick, loud noises may be uncomfortable to the point of pain or someone may not be aware that they have injured themselves. We would refer to these more significant experiences as Sensory Processing Difficulties.
Sensory Processing Difficulties can contribute to a state of anxiety in neurodivergent people and sensory strategies can be key in supporting well-being and emotional regulation.
Our Neurodevelopmental Conditions Learning Programme and our Autism Learning Programme as well as several of our workshops have a focus on sensory processing as we believe that this can be the key to improving many aspects of children's lives, including sleep, eating & toileting, anxiety and behaviour.
Further and more specific support can be requested via your local occupational therapy services. We work in partnership with the OT services in Liverpool to deliver Sensory Processing Training and Eating Difficulties Training. Other areas will have their own offer via Occupational Therapy.
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