Update

Tom has been able to access education all year, supported by four incredible teachers. We do not currently need to fundraise!

He‘s contributed to a magazine called The Drop written entirely by young people using letterboards. Hes developing an interest in music, Mozart is a particular favourite as well as his stalwarts The Beatles and Kinks.

Although his health is still very up and down his lessons are a very bright point in a sometimes difficult life. Thank you for helping Tom at a time when no official support was on offer.

Tom is an intelligent young man with autism who has missed out on an appropriate education and now has the chance to make a real difference.

Tom has regressive autism. This means that, having acquired skills at the usual rate as a toddler, he then lost many of them quite suddenly. In particular he lost almost all his speech between the ages of 3 and 6 years old.

For several years Tom failed to make much noticeable progress at a specialist school. Everybody who taught him thought he was intelligent but his learning levels (the measure of success) remained stuck at pre-school levels. Nobody who knew Tom thought he was only as intelligent as a toddler but, as the years went by, no system for Tom to fully show what he knew was found.

Finally, in 2018, when Tom was nearly 20 years old, his parents got chatting to the parent of another young non-verbal man who was using Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) Despite having very considerable motor planning difficulties (the bit that helps you move your body where you want it go) Tom engaged fully with RPM from the very first lesson. It was a complete revelation and the high point of an incredibly challenging few years for Tom.

Despite a long pause due to the pandemic he has been studying using RPM since then, accessing whatever teaching is available, funded primarily by his family. Using RPM Tom is able to study at secondary school level - but he has a lot of catching up to do. He is studying history, maths, science, politics, art history, poetry, English - just as any student would do. He is making great progress, writing poetry and, as he says, "has a particular love for geometry". He has also used RPM to say that he loves the fact that his voice is finally being heard and to tell us a little about how his OCD and stims affect his mind. He’s sharing his thoughts on life and the world around him supported by Alex, Elle and Claire, his brilliant RPM tutors.

RPM is changing Tom's life - he can access education, he can express his thoughts and he can engage with the world. RPM has, in turn, changed the attitudes of those around Tom, revealing an intelligent and thoughtful young man whose language skills may be regressed to the level of a 30-month old but whose intelligence and sense of humour has continued to develop despite appalling odds.

He now has a great deal of ground to make up and the aim is run a Rapid Prompting Method teaching approach for Tom for two hours a day to help him reach his potential. The annual cost of this is over £20,000, half of which has been raised by Tom's family and the remainder we aim to raise from donations and events.

Please would you help us to help Tom?