Autism Association 2025 Annual Report

Chief Executive Officer’s Report

2024/2025 was a year of strategic development in a demanding operating environment. Regardless, we remained focused on our mission to advance the participation of Autistic children and adults in all facets of social, educational and economic life in our community.

supervision. The program supports both Autism Association psychology registrars and external registrars with a pathway to registration. In addition, and very importantly, it provides an excellent grounding in disability and Autism as part of the core curriculum. We supported 88 Community Living homes this year, of which 68 are shared homes and the remainder individual homes. This is a very important service for individuals and families to support young people to live a more independent life in adulthood. In the year ahead, Community Living will further expand to deliver an Out of Home Care Program funded by the Department of Communities to support uniquely vulnerable young people. We look forward to working in partnership with the Department of Communities to deliver this very important service.

Services grew, including Diagnostic Services, Individual Community Support Services, Community Living, and Employment Support Services. We were very pleased to maintain our strong connections and work with schools through our School Age Therapy Services. We expanded our social skills programs for school age children and specialist therapy programs including Augmentative and Alternative Communication, in addition to a range of community inclusion projects. Services were provided to 7,764 service users, inclusive of Early Intervention, School Age Services, Community Participation, Employment Support, Community Living, Short Breaks and Diagnostic Services. We undertook over 2,800 consultancies across Western Australia and provided support to 15 regional areas, meeting with families, local service providers, health specialists and schools. We also

provided a range of training in regional areas to support local solutions in supporting individuals and families. This is in addition to intensive support services for families during school holidays. Our Early Intervention Services continued to be delivered in the community or from one of our five service hubs. This is a critically important service to families of young children at a time following diagnosis when support is greatly needed. In addition, therapy services for all ages remained in high demand, only impeded by workforce shortages of therapists. We were also very pleased this year to expand our Provisional Psychology Academy to support the professional development of psychology registrars toward AHPRA registration. This includes providing them with training, mentoring and Board-approved

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