Autism Dadcast

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...

First episode back after Christmas and we're catching up on everything. Andy talks about how lowering expectations made Christmas actually work this year. Gaz shares how Mish built Thomas a cardboard slide and put all his presents at the bottom so he could slide straight into them. Pot of Pringles was one of the presents and that was the win right there. Lydia's eating fried eggs now. Full runny y...

He had the house. The job. The wife. Three kids. On paper, everything was fine. But by the time his son Mason was three or four, he was falling apart. Barely sleeping. Drinking too much. Finding any excuse to stay out longer. Supermarket runs for things they didn't need. One more round at the pub. Anything to delay walking through the front door. He wasn't a bad dad. He just didn't kno...

A mainstream school put their autistic son in a converted staff room and left him there for two years. They called it support. Alan and his wife Alex fought for a specialist placement. Now Magnus is in a school with just 15 children total - five per key stage, one SEN teacher, and four teaching assistants. The transformation has been staggering. He's reading full books out loud for the first t...

She spent her childhood in detention. Locked a teacher in a cupboard. Sat in corridors alone while everyone else learned. Missed the last six months of school because nobody wanted her there. She wasn't naughty. She was undiagnosed. Charlie was finally diagnosed autistic at 32 and ADHD three weeks before this conversation. By then, she'd already closed her business to become a full-time carer for...

Steven has no autistic children. No family connection. No commercial interest. He just watched a movie and couldn't look away. In January, he was driving his van on the M1, listening to a documentary called The Spellers. It's about non-verbal autistic children who learned to communicate by pointing to letters on a board. 48 minutes in, he pulled over and cried. The children in the film all said th...

Luke has four children. Three of them are autistic. His youngest, Oscar, is non-verbal with PICA — he'll eat anything, including sand and his own faeces. For years, Luke and his wife managed. He gave up his job as an HGV driver because the phone calls from home couldn't wait two hours for him to get back from Hereford. His parents were their only support network — his dad had worked with d...

At 10 years old, during lockdown, Charlotte watched a BBC series about autism. She saw herself in it. So she did what most adults wouldn't — she researched it, gathered the evidence, and presented it to her parents. They didn't believe her at first. She didn't fit the stereotype. She wasn't a boy obsessed with trains. She was put on the pathway. She waited 3 years. She went through...