SENCOS: Supporting Staff to Support Neurodiverse Students: Part 2

Staff training on neurodiversity often stops at knowing more. The harder part is turning that knowledge into something a history or science teacher can do in their next lesson.

Start with a three-step habit for any CPD: learn something, apply it to your own setting, then build strategies with the students themselves. The session works through one example in full. Theory of mind is the ability to picture what someone else thinks, knows or feels. It helps explain why an autistic student might expect you to know how they feel, or be thrown when someone says one thing and means another. It's a more useful reading than the old idea that autistic people lack empathy.

From there you'll find tasks in ordinary subjects that build theory of mind, like predicting what a character will do next, hot-seating in English or drama, or comparing predictions before a science experiment.