Autism CRC partnered with the First 5 Forever team in Brisbane City Council (BCC) Libraries to undertake this project. Currently, more than 160 early literacy sessions, sometimes referred to as Story Time sessions, are conducted in BCC libraries each week, with more than 300,000 adults and children attending annually.

The overall aim of this project was to enable more inclusive participation of preschoolers on the autism spectrum in Story Time sessions delivered in BCC libraries.

We aimed to addressed this by:

1. Providing professional development training to build knowledge of
   1. autism
   2. emergent literacy development in preschoolers on the autism spectrum
   3. strategies for working with children on the autism spectrum
2. Developing autism-friendly Story Times for parents of preschoolers on the autism spectrum, to be delivered by library staff
3. Embedding the autism-friendly Story Times into community practice through development of a multimedia professional development package for ongoing use.

This project provided an overview of the development and refinement of an online professional development package to support autism-friendly Story Time sessions delivered by librarians in the community libraries.

Download final report

Download executive summary

Download visual snapshot