The AET has been sharing the voice of young autistic people since it started in 2007.
Since 2016, The AET has been supported by a panel of Autistic Young Experts. The experts, aged 16 to 25, add their voice and life experience to AET projects and input on strategy.
As well as providing specific feedback on projects such as exclusions and exam accommodations by sharing their experience, they co-chaired the 2018 AET National Conference, in London, have spoken at other AET events, and shared their experiences with professionals in film.
You can read more about the Autistic Young Experts in their own words, and revise the Terms of reference, here.

Who are we?
We are a panel made up of nine autistic young people from across England. We have different experiences of education and of being autistic.
We bring experience of different types of education from home education, mainstream schools, special schools and university.
While we are all autistic that doesn’t make our experiences the same. Many of us struggled with education and we don’t want that to be the experience for other autistic young people.
What have we been doing?
In May 2020, the AYE Panel started working with Dr Karen Guldberg at the University of Birmingham. Their input throughout this research shed light on exclusion from an autistic perspective. Some of the panel have experience of exclusion, offering authenticity in the research.
The AYE Panel reviewed the research summary and looked at usual ways of presenting the research for those who prefer usual formats.
In January 2021 we continued working on PSHE and utilising the feedback from the Department for Education and schools which have piloted the resources. The resources and assemblies have been co-produced with the AET Panel and were then tested in the education environment to see what needed tweaking.
These tweaks and changes were evaluated and reviewed by the panel before the resources were finalised.
In February and March 2021 the AYE panel started working on a toolkit for the AET materials on how trainers can co-train and co-deliver training with an autistic young person.
This will build upon the work we’ve done to understand how training works as part of what the AET delivers and how autism should be spoken about.
The panel have also been working on the Good Practice Promises for schools and we have had one person from our youth network (not actually in the panel) Aiden, who filmed for the AET about his exclusion experience.
Terms of Reference - May 2022
Click on the headings below to read more about our terms of reference...
