Culture and connection: building strong home-school partnerships with culturally and linguistically diverse families of autistic children

Strong, effective partnerships between teachers and caregivers can substantially improve all children and young people’s success in and out of school, including autistic children and young people. Such partnerships between parents and schools may be especially important for autistic students since they can benefit from learning supports and consistent approaches across contexts. Yet, we have little knowledge of experiences of home-school partnerships for families from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds who have autistic children. This research sought to bridge the gap in knowledge for CALD families of autistic children by listening directly to the first-hand experiences of parents of autistic children from different communities, namely Chinese, Vietnamese, Somali and Middle Eastern. This Report describes parents’ experiences and suggests ways we may be able to promote more successful partnerships between CALD communities and kindergartens/schools in the future.