Canopus

Myers Briggs was developed in the 1940s without any knowledge of ASD. It has not been updated to take into account developments in psychology since then. There has never been any large scale Myers Briggs tests carried out on people with ASD so it is not known which personality types are the most and least common. Myers Briggs also cannot be used to determine whether a person is NT or ASD. The importance of Myers Briggs nowadays is that it is commonly used in job interviews which is not the original purpose of the test. It was originally intended to be used by professional psychologists and its use in job interviews by managers and HR types with only a superficial knowledge of psychology could be misuse of a tool.

Who here is contesting the council elections this year?

This bedroom tax is a pathetic and ill thought out piece of legislation. I can see where the government is coming from in London and some parts of the south that have housing shortages but it will hit the hardest in the north where under occupancy is higher because of a shortage of one bedroom properties. It also won't achieve anything because there is actually a surplus of housing in some towns. The public needs to make a stand against this.

It is the prevailing etiquette but if people didn't break etiquette then we would all be living like the Victorians. I find it hard to believe a country can be considered democratic if society places a gag order on political discussion.

Rarely do I get through a day without somebody telling me "I don't do politics". This is a concept that I find difficult to comprehend because it effectively opens the door to allow hostile forces to walk all over that person. I am a strong believer in fighting for one's right using whatever means are necessary. This view was probably shaped during my time at residential school where kids had to fight for the right to breathe. Do you think that the time has now come for British society to kick the habit and start to become more political?

Nonsense. I have been involved in the HE movement for years so I know what the law is and the impact of the raising of the school leaving age on HE kids. Local Authority websites are well known for giving half-truths or misinformation about HE. One LA was forced to make large alterations to its website after erroneously thinking that the HE provisions set out in the Children, Schools and Families bill were now law whilst the bill was still circulating in Parliament.

Home education counts as full time education in this instance. So does private education. Government sites are notoriously bad at giving quality advice for parents considering home education and many were completely silent on the matter until a few years ago.

This is all rubbish. There isn't a school leaving age because school isn't compulsory.

Uneven profiles are a common feature of kids with AS. The state education system is based around average profiles for a particular age and fails to capitalise on strengths of high ability students. Many parents focus their attention on the weaknesses and often let talents and strengths go to waste because only they can capitalise on them rather than the education system.

Most kids with high functioning AS are quite capable of getting good grades in exams providing they are interested in the subject and are offered the appropriate teaching and support. Parents should not assume that problems at school in general will translate into problems with exams. My own experience of things is that too many parents of kids with AS are so immersed into focusing on issues like fitting in at school with its system, endless tedious classwork assignments, social problems with classmates, and what their kids are bad at, that they tend to overlook serious study and exams until Y10. Many kids with AS will benefit from accelerated learning in subjects that they are good at and interested in and taking of GCSE exams early. This is something that few parents of kids with AS have seriously looked into and they are largely absent from the 'take GCSEs early' community.

There is at least one person with an official diagnosis of AS who has a full category G and H for a road roller and tracked vehicle on their licence. He doesn't drive the vehicles everyday as part of a job but is involved from time to time in some restoration of historic machinery.

Has any research been carried out into ASD and driving vehicles other than cars? I have a category C1 on my driving licence which is a 7.5 tonne lorry. Category B covers cars and vans up to 3.5 tonnes. I have never taken a driving test in a category C1 vehicle but everyone who took a car test before the theory test came in had C1 included as standard. Are there any safety issues with people with ASD? Should an ASD diagnosis result in removing the C1 from a driving licence and only restoring after passing a test in a category C1 vehicle?

George Osborne does not understand economics. He tries to force people into jobs that do not exist. He tries to force people into jobs that do not pay a living wage. He tries to force people out of jobs to lounge around back home with mum and dad because housing benefit cuts means they cannot afford to rent a house 100 miles away. His economic policies are more suited to 1912 when there were thousands of factories that couldn't get enough people to work in them. He ignores the work of John Maynard Keynes. This is a snapshot of the type of education that his public school teaches.

I think that the NAS should be fought alongside all the other government funded 'fake' charities. In today's economic climate it is wrong that public money is given to charities whilst services in the public sector are being cut back. A law should be passed that charities cannot be funded by the government. If the government was genuinely committed to providing for ASD then they should be spending the money in schools and the NHS instead. Asperger Technical is currently working on a similar project as part of its restructuring. The only problem is that discussions with senior figures from industry have revealed that a high proportion of jobs which people with AS excel in have been outsourced to low wage countries and the jobs which remain tend to be low skilled with a required physical presence or require good NT people skills like marketing, management, personnel. Globalisation has rewritten the economics rule book. The education system is still reading the rule book printed in the 1980s.

How can we mount a stand against the NAS and hammer home the message that it is a corrupt institution that lets down thousands of people with AS? I have considered starting a campaign to stop the government donating money to the NAS but are the consequences of this too severe for people with classic autism who require expensive to run services?

The problem all boils down to funding. Many independent AS support groups are struggling to survive financially whereas the NAS receives nearly 90% of a multimillion pound income stream from the taxpayer so isn't really reliant upon donations. This brings into question whether AS support groups can survive without government funding even if they currently provide much better services than the NAS does. Some parents hold the view that half a loaf is better than none meaning that a compromised, and somewhat dysfuctional, NAS straitjacketed by the strings attached to government money is better than no support groups at all, so we should stop complaining and make the most of what we can have.

My findings are that people who are new to AS overwhelmingly head straight for the NAS because of its prominence and recommendations from the education system and the NHS. Those who have been in the AS game for a long time and have built up a wealth of experience are increasingly steering clear of the NAS because of its failure to deliver combined with a frustrating inability to reform and improve the organisation. A similar situation has taken place in home education with parents who are just starting out overwhelmingly heading for Education Otherwise whilst experience home educators tend to avoid it. There is a whole raft of information out there on the internet for teenagers and adults with AS which is beginning to render the NAS redundant. Unfortunately, parents might see things as different, especially when it comes to problems with schools, because they have their faith and trust in the professionals from the establishment. If the NAS says X and the independent AS support groups say Y about how schools should provide services, the schools will do X and most parents will broadly agree with it. Employers are also more likely to want to work with national organisations which have a good name and reputation complete with mainstream media coverage than small obscure local groups. When I read this I got the impression that the NAS has pulled the ripcord to release the parachute 20 years after hitting the ground! I'm not going to reiterate what other users have posted, but I am concerned as exactly how this project will pan out and whether much positive will come from it. There have been times when I have wondered whether the NAS has deliberately functioned as a roadblock to the deployment of better quality services for people with AS by independent organisations because of its huge presence and government backing.

There is a very cosy relationship between the NAS and the government which enables them to push through for the autism bill in a way that independent support groups don't stand a chance. What do you consider to be the best future autism strategy: working through the NAS and reforming it to be more representative of the real ASD community, or improving and expanding other ASD support groups which already have a better understanding of the needs of the ASD community and are often better at providing tangible support than the NAS is?

The problem is partially a result that the NAS does much of its work through schools and seems to lack an effective mechanism to deal with people outside of the school system. Parents of home educated kids overwhelmingly say that the NAS is next to useless for them because it doesn't offer them many services. It was highlighted several years ago at an AS meeting that the NAS channels a considerable proportion of its resources towards its network of special schools and providing residential support services. In reality the fastest growing section of the ASD community since about 1995 are people who don't require residential support services nor do the NAS run schools effectively cater for their needs. Instead they require services for the environment in which they work or study. This is a situation that I'm concerned about. The NAS is run primarily by NT parents and lacks input from adults with AS. It is important to take into account that the NAS did not contribute anything to co-discover Asperger syndrome in the UK. Prior to Hans Asperger's paper being translated into English in 1991, the NAS just focused on classic autism. Nobody ever did investigations into child behaviour at school to identify if the autistic spectrum extended further or to find explanations to the then mysterious AS traits.

A trawl through older posts from 2005 to 2007 will be revealing.

I was discussing the NAS with a parent who was very unimpressed with the services and level of support it provided for her son with high functioning AS. When I told her that the government handed £78.7 million of the taxpayer's money to the NAS in 2010 which amounted to 89.1% of its total income her jaw nearly hit the floor. She then questioned whether the NAS was really an outpost of the government rather than a charity, and if the government is willing to spend £78.7 million pounds on ASD then why on earth do they not channel it through their own public sector institutions like state schools, the NHS, and councils? Last year I raised the issue of the NAS being a government funded 'fake' charity. Now it has been officially revealed that the NAS is a fake charity. http://www.asd-forum.org.uk/forum/index.php?/topic/27617-the-nas-not-much-cop/#entry317502 http://fakecharities.org/2011/02/charity-269425/ The NAS is similar to the National Lottery and how it managed to effectively nationalise lotteries by driving the existing local lotteries to extinction! A serious problem with the NAS receiving such a high proportion of its funding from the government is that it is forced to respect the government's policies because biting the government in the butt will be biting the hand which feeds it. The NAS has the public recognition and is also the ASD organisation backed by the education system, the NHS, and much of the mainstream media. I was discussing this issue with a parent who is a manager of an independent local ASD support group who told me that whenever ASD is suspected in kids by schools or NHS doctors then they are always referred to the NAS and never to the independent local support group. He has tried and tried in vain to raise awareness of his support group with the LA and GPs but they all seem to ignore it in favour of the NAS. As a result of this the majority of parents head straight for the NAS and only those who search further afield or are let down by the NAS approach the local support group. Another problem is that parents have a liking of obtaining all their services under one roof (just like shopping at a supermarket) rather than using different service providers for different things (like the High Street shops) which further skews public support towards the NAS rather than more specialised ASD service providers. We have had several forum users in the past who have been members of the NAS. Most of them hold favourable views towards it.

I have encountered several parents over the years who have made similar statements.

The detector vans were for real and contained working detection equipment. I have technical articles about them that were published in a BT magazine which was available to the public. They are no longer usable because they only worked with analogue TVs. I have a feeling that detection equipment is no longer in use because digital TVs are much harder to detect and do not emit the same tell-tale signals that analogue TVs do. That's easier said than done. The enquiries officer has to PROVE that you are watching a live programme rather than a recording. If you are watching an obscure or foreign channel and the enquiries officer doesn't have a schedule to hand then it's very difficult to prove. Remember that you are innocent until proven guilty!

Is anybody disappointed with the NAS, or feel that it doesn't provide the services that your family requires?

I refuse to buy a TV licence because I do not want to finance the Blatant Biased Corporation. It's a downright cheek that you legally need a TV licence to watch foreign satellite channels. The technology exists now that analogue broadcasts have been switched off to replace the TV licence with a smart card enabling reception of BBC channels, so why isn't it used?