Autism Dadcast

Fifty episodes in, and last week we asked for one thing: a party that would put a proper plan for SEND families on the table. This week, one did. Gaz and Andy start with the Oxford Half Marathon and the £1,360 you helped raise for Ambitious About Autism, including one anonymous £700 that took the pressure right off. Thank you, whoever you are. Then a listener in our Discord sent in Restore Britain...

Some families are now facing a two-year minimum wait just to be assessed for autism. Around 295,000 people are on the waiting list in England. A private clinic can do it in weeks, if you can pay. Gaz and Andy start with the "golden ticket" debate. The diagnosis opens the door to support, so what happens to the families who cannot afford to skip the queue? Andy remembers the first time he filled in...

Not the episode we planned to record. This week a three year old went missing from a playground in Suffolk and was found in a pond the next day. He was non-verbal, partially deaf and on the autism pathway. Thirteen hundred members of the public joined the search. This is not an investigation, and it is not a judgement on a devastated family. It is about a danger that thousands of families live wit...

Andy put a post up asking autism parents to name the one fear they have never said out loud. 858 people answered, and 103 of them said almost exactly the same thing. So we sat down and read them. Not the tidy ones, the ones people only admit when nobody can see their name next to it. Mourning the child you thought you were getting. Envying families who can wake up and just go somewhere. Feeling li...

Robbie Williams announced at 52 that he is autistic, and said he has "a little bit of autism". Within a day the community had split over the phrasing. Gaz and Andy use it as a way into the question that keeps coming back. If one word covers Robbie Williams, and the same word covers Lydia, who is five, non-verbal and working with Makaton cards, does it still tell anyone anything? And if i...

Andy put a video up asking one question: which phrase from a professional never left you? His own was a paediatrician who would not answer whether Lydia was autistic, and instead said "we just need to ensure she reaches her potential, whatever that looks like." Around 685 parents answered. It is the only post we have ever done that got more comments than likes. So we sorted the lot and r...

Across the world, parents of autistic children are being offered something that sounds almost miraculous. Clinics promise better speech, better eye contact, calmer behaviour, and in some cases claim to repair or reverse autism. The price runs from £10,000 to £40,000, and often more than once. Over the last few months we've been approached by clinic after clinic wanting to come on the show and...

This week Gaz and Andy sit down with Jolanta Lasota, Chief Executive of Ambitious about Autism, at their college in Isleworth. 16 years leading the charity and mum to a 21-year-old autistic son, Jolanta has seen the whole picture, from the early years right through to adulthood and employment. We talk about why purpose matters more than exams, the young man who is non-speaking and holds down two j...

Paul Mullin has scored goals in front of millions and become a household name through Welcome to Wrexham. But this one is about the part of his life the cameras rarely catch: being dad to Albi, his autistic son. Gaz and Andy sit down with Paul for an honest, Albi-centric conversation about the regression that stopped his little boy in his tracks, the guilt that kept him up at night, and why he wou...

One missed board and one wrong word at in the morning, and Thomas's whole morning falls apart. This week Gaz and Andy unpack how much detail autistic kids track, why a single word can rewrite their day, and how much they understand even mid-meltdown. Plus Lydia becomes swimmer of the week, the new-neighbour conversation every autism parent knows, and an honest, conflicted take on the under-16 soci...

Every parent of an autistic child has been told the same thing: just take the nappy off and sit them on the toilet. This week Gaz and Andy sit down with Charmaine, a learning disability nurse turned continence consultant with over 30 years of experience, and find out why that advice not only fails, it can make things worse. What starts as a chat about toilet training turns into something much bigg...

You can know your child inside out and still be blindsided in the space of a week. This one starts with Thomas opening the front door and wandering off down a hill in a quiet Shropshire village - the same week Lydia did almost exactly the same thing. From there it runs into the half-term chaos that brought biting back out of nowhere, the dread of summer toilet training and puberty creeping into vi...

You sit down with the paediatrician. You've got half an hour. You know the first 20 minutes will be you trying to prove your child is different to every other child in that waiting room - and you'll walk out no further forward. Orrin Benford knows that feeling. After a year of being fobbed off across GPs, neurologists and urologists for his daughter Indie, he stopped trying to remember everything...

Adam Parkinson came on this week. One of the Two Mr. Ps. Teaching assistant. Podcaster. Dad of two — a 10-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old autistic son called Max. We talked about Max. We talked about the plane aisle moment his wife filmed without telling him, that went viral and started everything. We talked about siblings, and what it means to watch your daughter try not to look upset when her...

We ran the London Marathon. We didn't train. We finished it. And then we had a conversation we weren't expecting to have. Halfway through writing this off as a marathon recap, we ended up admitting something neither of us had said out loud before. We talk a lot about wanting to be around as long as we can for our kids. But if we're honest, we're not always doing the things that would actually make...

We put two sets of questions to the community. One for dads, one for mums. The dads sent seven. The mums sent seventeen. And most of the mums' questions were about how to get their partner on board. This one hits different. We talk about what happens when you refuse to accept your child's diagnosis. Why dads get left behind. Why mums end up carrying everything. And the moment you have to stop maki...

What happens when you die and your child doesn't understand death? What if they just think you walked away? That's where this conversation ended up. It started with a story about a mum who overheard a dad talking about his autistic son and accused him of saying his life was harder than hers. It turned into something neither Gaz nor Andy were prepared for. Pre-recorded death videos. Whether...

When your autistic child turns 18, you stop being their parent in the eyes of the law. You have to apply to the Court of Protection, pay £850, wait four months, and hope social services don't oppose it. If you don't, hospitals won't listen to you and you can't touch their bank account. We didn't know this. Most parents of young autistic children don't. A petition hit the parliamentary website aski...

If you've ever looked at your child mid-meltdown and thought "I can't do this anymore," this one's for you. In this episode, Gaz sits down with his wife Mish for a raw, unfiltered conversation about what life was really like from the moment Thomas was born. The traumatic birth. The baby who wouldn't latch, wouldn't calm, wouldn't make eye contact. The feeling of b...

The government's SEND White Paper promises a better system. But what happens when the independent expert on your complaints panel gets outvoted by governors? We asked the Minister directly. Gaz and Andy sat down with Georgia Gould, Minister for Schools, inside the Department for Education to put the questions SEND families are actually asking. The tribunal gap. The complaints panel. The undefi...

Two SEND parents were inside the government meetings every week for months. Here's what they saw — and what they had to fight to change. In this episode, Gaz and Andy sit down with Hayley and Aimee from SEND Sanctuary, who were part of the official SEND Improvement Group advising on the white paper. They break down what's actually in it, what nearly made it in that didn't, and why the bits that go...

We talk through the latest SEND reform leaks and why the “EHCPs protected until 2030” line doesn’t feel like protection at all. We get into the DfE promo videos, the staged “mainstream SEND classroom” example, and why it looks like the narrative is being set before the white paper drops. Key themes: - EHCPs “protected until 2030” and what that implies after - Mainstream capacity promises vs real-w...

This episode isn’t about us. It’s about you. We asked families to share where they’ve been failed by the SEND system. What came back was overwhelming. Draft EHCPs left open for months. Support written into plans but never delivered. Children kept “on roll” with no education. Operational failures that destroyed trust. Teenagers saying they’d rather be dead than go back to school. These aren’t isola...

We’ve had SEND reform info leaked from a source being called credible, and it’s been picked up by The i Paper and the Financial Times. If it’s real, it suggests a four tier non-statutory system before a child can even qualify for an EHCP, with the EHCP sitting above it all like some golden ticket. That matters because non-statutory support can’t be appealed, and it basically creates a fail-first p...

We met with the Schools Minister this week. We sat with Georgia Gould on a panel for an hour and we asked the questions you sent in. Georgia suggested coming on the podcast for a long form conversation. We didn't ask for it, she offered. That impressed us because politicians don't usually put themselves in uncomfortable positions like that. Then we got a message from a parent who had to remortgage...