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Bill Sutton, the principal at Thorndon Primary school, retired last month after 45 years in education and over two decades at Thorndon School. New Zealand has about 2500 schools and principals are appointed and leave every week, so why is this retirement worth commenting on?
It’s because he’s just the principal you want your local school [...]

Just before Christmas 2008, the act establishing National Standards testing in education (as well as bigger fines for truancy) was rushed through all its stages in parliament by the newly elected National Government, without any scutiny from the select committee process. 
Soon after that I was in the local supermarket when I saw the Member of [...]

Reprinted from http://strangeringodzone.blogspot.com/ 7 August 2011 with permission from the author Penni Winter.
Paula Jessop, a Kiwi aspie and friend of mine, was preparing a presentation on ‘Adults with ASD’ recently, and asked us aspies on Facebook, what were ‘The Top Five Things We Want People to Know About Adults on the Spectrum’. The resulting discussion [...]

On the coldest day of year in Wellington, 25 July,  a New Zealand rightwing think tank, the Maxim Institute, hosted a seminar at Victoria University for the Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith, the British government’s Secretary for Work and Pensions and architect of its welfare ‘reforms’.
Why is he visiting and why should New Zealanders to [...]

About two weeks after the destructive Christchurch earthquake of 22 February 2011, a newspaper report showed the badly bruised face of a young man they called ‘the face of looting’ who had been caught stealing light fittings from a damaged property and had been remanded in jail. The Minister of Police herself responded with comments [...]

This is an updated version of  an article in the Parent to Parent National Newsletter Autumn 2011.  Thank you to Kate for sharing her story and Parent to Parent for permission to reprint. Kate is from Southland and is involved with Parent to Parent and Autism New Zealand.
 
2009 started off beautifully for my family. I gave birth [...]

For the last three years I have been working on an academic thesis about how autism policy could be improved if people with lived experience could be brought into the process as experts. One of my hopes for the future is for autism enterprises run by and for autistic people (with support from NTs like me as required) who [...]

Our youngest child was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes over the weekend, which naturally has rather upset the whole family and will take some time and effort to get used to. But while the memory of these first few days is fresh, we think it might be useful to account for some of the very [...]

From Bat, Bean Beam (13 September 2010), ‘a weblog on memory and technology’ by Giovanni Tiso of Wellington. Republished here on humans with his permission.
http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2010/09/questions-asked.html
This is not our daughter’s story, so much so that I won’t even call her by name. It is the story of sixteen months spent battling to ensure that she have [...]

I am lucky to have just had a letter on autism published in the New Scientist. I was responding to an article published 26 June 2010, p 42-5 which looked at some of the interventions and therapies parents of autistic children use on their children. Not surprisingly for a scientific magazine, there was a questioning tone as to why some parents do not consider [...]