Here are some of the people you might meet if you take part in the START trial.
Alex leads the START project. She is a is a developmental psychologist at the University of Oxford and will be running some of the assessment visits.
Ailbhe will be helping with the follow-up assessments for START. Ailbhe has several years of research experience conducting projects with neurodivergent children and teenagers. Her PhD was about understanding mental health in neurodivergent teenage girls.
Gabi will be helping the follow-up assessments for START. She has recently completed an MSc in Child Development, and has three young children of her own.
Maryna will be helping with some of the START toddler assessments. Maryna joins us from Ukraine where she has many years’ experience in diagnostic assessments, and working with children with special educational needs.
Other members of the START team, past and present
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Who developed the START programme?
The START programme has been developed by Dr Alexandra Hendry, in collaboration with Peeple. Dr Hendry is a developmental psychologist at the University of Oxford. She specialises in understanding the development of early executive functions – the thinking and regulation skills that allow us to control our impulses, think flexibly to solve problems, and set and work towards goals.
Peeple are a charity whose main purpose is to support parents or carers, babies and children to learn together. Their evidence-based Learning Together Programme is a strengths-based approach to working with families, focusing on doing with rather than doing to parents. The Learning Together Programme provides the foundations for the START programme but the content has been specifically developed with the needs and interests of parents and toddlers with a family connection to autism or ADHD in mind.
The START programme has been developed with input from autistic parents and parents who have a child with autism or ADHD (see Community Input page). The content has also been reviewed by Speech and Language and Early Years practitioners.
Who is delivering the START programme?
The START programme is being delivered by Peeple early years practitioners who have been specially trained in the START programme.
Who else is involved?
The project is being overseen by 2 groups: the project advisory group described on the Community input page, along with a Study Steering Committee. The members of the Study Steering Committee are: Tony Charman (Kings College London), Frances Gardner (University of Oxford), Cat Hughes (Autistica), Claire Hughes (University of Cambridge), Sandra Mathers (University of Oxford), Vanessa Raymont (University of Oxford), Sinead Rhodes (University of Edinburgh), Gaia Scerif (University of Oxford), Alan Stein (University of Oxford), Sally Smith (Peeple).
Ethical approval for the project has been granted by the University of Oxford Medical Sciences Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee: (R67115/RE001).
The START feasibility trial is funded by NIHR: (NIHR300880).
START project 