ADDvanced Solutions Community Network

ADDvanced Solutions Community Network is a Liverpool-based community interest company, set up in October 2012, that helps families make sense of neurodivergence in a child or teenager — whether or not a diagnosis is in the picture. Its offer is open access. No referral, diagnosis or waiting list stands between a parent and the first session. It is commissioned and funded across Cheshire and Merseyside, covering Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens, Warrington and Wirral, and it trains the teachers and practitioners around those families as well as the families themselves.

The backbone is the weekly Community Network Group, a drop-in where parents and carers meet others in the same position and pick up a short, practical workshop on a different theme each week. Around it sit structured programmes: a three-session Neurodevelopmental Conditions Learning Programme, and courses on autism, ADHD, sensory processing, sleep, eating, toileting, early years and moving into adulthood. There are also half- and full-day workshops on questions such as school attendance difficulties and SEND support, and it has run a BSL version of its autism programme. Parents who come through the programmes can train to co-facilitate their local group, a model it calls Families Empowering Families. The aim is support that becomes peer-led over time rather than resting on professionals.

Young people are supported directly where the organisation is commissioned to do so. That includes one-to-one or small-group coaching for 12- to 19-year-olds, short programmes such as ADHD and Me, Autism and Me and a siblings course, a young people's group, and Nano Neuro assemblies for whole schools. For professionals it runs free, CPD-accredited awareness training in commissioned areas, an NHS-funded ADHD workshop in Liverpool, and training on Knowing Me, the Cheshire and Merseyside strengths-and-needs profiling tool. Its staff come from education, health, community development and SEND, and many are parents of neurodivergent children or neurodivergent themselves. What is on offer differs from borough to borough, so families should check their local page before assuming a particular service runs near them.