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Question for Department of Health

UIN HL4715, tabled on 5 February 2015

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the remarks by Earl Howe on 4 February (HL Deb, col 644), what monitoring and reporting procedures exist to measure the effectiveness of local training programmes aimed at supporting diagnoses of autism.

Answered on

17 February 2015

The national autism self-assessment exercises led by Public Health England, the Department of Health and the Association of Adult Directors of Social Services are a means of identifying progress in implementing the Adult Autism Strategy as a whole and for demonstrating local accountability. They include questions about adult diagnosis. The third self-assessment exercise is currently being undertaken by local authorities and their partners. How long it takes an adult to obtain a diagnosis and the number of diagnosis taking place within three months of referral is not recorded by the self-assessment. In the last self-assessment exercise in February 2014 a total of 4,702 adults were reported by 110 local authority areas as having completed a local diagnostic pathway in the previous year.

The number of children diagnosed with autism is not collected centrally but data on children in school in England whose primary special educational need is an autism spectrum condition is collected in an annual Special Educational Needs survey by the Department for Education. This data is found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/special-educational-needs-in-england-january-2014

Training to support autism diagnoses will be part of Continuing Professional Development and other training materials and will be audited at a local level.