Well Stage 1 of SCALES has now closed. With the help of 194 schools and 243 fabulous teachers, we have screening data for 7,674 children or ~70% of all of the children that started school in Surrey last September! We have a very short period of time to select from this dataset the 500 children […]
Apologies for the radio silence, but it’s been a busy few weeks here behind the scenes at SCALES. Debbie and I have now written to, emailed and phoned every school in Surrey (mainstream, special, independent and even home school families). That is about 340 schools. There are a few that haven’t replied definitively, but 70% […]
You’ve probably heard that the DSM – the manual that guides clinical and research diagnosis – is changing. And if you know that, it is probably in the context of some major changes in DSM-V to the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the introduction of Social Communication Disorder. I’m not going to […]
Last week a series of events brought home to me the enormity of the SCALES project. Luckily, I’ve had some help to get through it all. Here are a few examples, in numbers: 10,000: the number of parent information leaflets delivered in 25 boxes. The RHUL Communications team has done a fantastic job and they […]
More than 80 years ago Virginia Woolf published an extended essay entitled ‘A Room of One’s Own’ in which she asked ‘where are all the women in history of English literature?’ She concluded that for the most part they were too busy scrubbing floors and caring for children, husbands and others to have the opportunity […]
I got a bit of flak from my last blog for suggesting that some highly experimental studies involving a small number of adults with a particular cognitive profile may not be relevant to the everyday lives of all people with autism. I was accused on Twitter and other places of being ‘biased’. At first I […]
Sunday was Mother’s Day. I woke up in my mother-in-law’s house with a horrendous cold and conjunctivitis, my left eye swollen and weeping. My daughter was glued to the enormous television in the lounge (a rare treat for her) and I could hear my usually patient husband, now weary with ill wife, elderly mother and […]
Academic life can be brutal at times. I became an academic because there were questions that I wanted to answer about why some children fail to learn their native language as expected. The only way to pursue this research question is to convince another group of academics that my ideas are valuable and worth funding. […]
Many years ago I had the amazing good fortune to work as a research assistant for Dorothy Bishop. My job was to drive the length and breadth of Britain assessing six-year-old twins, many of whom had language impairment. I was a speech-language therapist at the time, so I knew a fair bit about assessing young […]