Last week Dr Lucy Brown-Wright hosted an excellent parent talk on Zoom for our Year 5-13 parents on the topic of Neurodiversity, with a focus on ADHD.

Dr Lucy is a Child Psychologist who has specialised in the areas of education, neuropsychology, neurodevelopment, psychopharmacology and the assessment of autism spectrum at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she was based for twenty years. During this time, she was the Lead Psychologist for assessing highly complex young people with neurodevelopment difficulties from all over the United Kingdom and beyond. Dr. Lucy has been in private practice for more than 20 years. Her professional training and experience, alongside being a mother of two boys has been central in shaping her understanding about child development, education and trajectories.

In response to the recent Panorama programme that uncovered poor practice around ADHD diagnosis in a particular London clinic, Dr. Lucy wanted to focus the talk on ADHD. Dr. Lucy has recently been interviewed in The Telegraph in response to the airing of Panorama.

The talk showed how ADHD can present in a multitude of ways, where there may be reduced function and included advice on how to help students with ADHD who have difficulty in keeping to deadlines.  Dr Lucy also spoke about how one of the first signs of ADHD may be anxiety and the importance of exploring the source of that anxiety. She also discussed how it was best to identify any signs before adolescence as the brain enters its second period of development and strategies to support can be practised and ignited during these years.

A number of useful resources were shared during the talk, including:

Professor Stephen Scott – Parenting/Neurodiversity
Seth Perler videos around Neurodiversity

Dr. Lucy founded PEERS, one of the few programmes that has a strong evidence-base for developing social understanding and interactions, commonly used for young people with ADHD, social anxiety and social communication difficulties. The next PEERS 9-session programme starts in September. If you have concerns about your child’s social integration, the quality of their social interactions and you and your teen are interested in developing healthy integration, please get in touch with us as soon as possible by completing this form.

A big thank you to Dr Lucy for a highly informative webinar. Proceeds from the talk went to the Minerva Foundation, a charity set up to develop literacy skills.