What does the end of funded LEANS staff time mean for teachers, schools, and you? End of LEANS funding—but not the LEANS resources! After more than 3.5 years, the funding for the LEANS research project officially ended on December 8th, 2023. The LEANS resource pack, parent-carer resources, and this website will remain online as usual throughout 2024 and beyond. No one will lose access, and all terms of use remain the same! If this access changes in the future, we will give as much notice as possible through the mailing list, website, and social media. The end of project funding means that we no longer have any staff members. No one is paid to work on the project, nor has it as part of their job remit for those who are permanently employed in other roles. The end of staffing means … We are not able to create new content (though a few last updates are coming in January 2024!) We must reduce the support/contact we offer We have little/no capacity to participate in talks and events. See details below. Our LEANS team members are still interested in continuing this work in some form, or being part of new projects around neurodiversity and education. Should we secure funding for a secondary school version of LEANS or any other follow-on projects, we will inform people through the mailing list, website, and social media. Despite the end of funding … we still expect to have a few more pieces of content that will become available in 2024, including an updated community-suggested resource list and a publication on our evaluation study. Stay tuned, because we will continue to update the website and mailing list when there is LEANS news! Contacting the project Our contact page has been updated in December 2023—please check it for the latest advice about how we can/can’t help, and who to contact. You can still contact LEANS after the end of our funding. The LEANS@ed.ac.uk account remains active and will be checked weekly for the foreseeable future. We do not have capacity to rapidly respond to queries - thank you for your patience. Please do not e-mail individual LEANS contacts if you have already mailed the LEANS project e-mail address. Please help us to help you, with our limited capacity, by making the project website your first port of call for any enquiries. We still routinely receive many queries that are already answered on the website, for example in our FAQs. We will update this website and our LEANS mailing list if there is any change to LEANS contact information in the future. Thank you The LEANS project would like to thank the Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre and research co-ordinator Sue Davidson for their generous, long-term support with LEANS communication and web updates, past the funded end of the project. Our policy on events and speaking invitations (2024 onward) This policy info is also available on our new events policy page. As a default, we will need to decline future invitations for talks and events. We may be able to make a limited number of exceptions where there is a particularly strong opportunity to promote LEANS and neurodiversity understanding. We are more likely to be able to make an exception where one or more of the following apply: Event is online Larger audiences; audiences made up of decision-makers Organisers offer a speaking fee to cover our team members’ preparation and participation Flexibility over dates or times If you are looking for a general LEANS talk, please keep in mind that there are alternatives, such as the recorded talks linked from our talks and media page (all free), or contacting a LEANS Champion, some of whom are willing to participate in events. If you are interested in commissioning training or consultancy, you are still very welcome to contact us about this as usual. Other LEANS activities and supports Publications, recorded talks and media will all stay online and available as usual Translation and licensing: LEANS remains available for translation and licensing proposals as usual. Please start with the info on our translation webpage before contacting us. LEANS Champions are still available, and their contact info remains online. Find out about Champions. Future research collaborations, commissioning training or consulting: Yes, please continue to contact us! We are still answering enquiries. As has been the policy in 2022-2023, we cannot support any study visits, internships, or work placements, and are not offering student research experience or volunteering opportunities. Please do not contact us to request these, as we cannot accommodate you. Thank you again to everyone who has been part of LEANS While this isn’t the end of LEANS as a resource and a community, it’s an important place to pause and say thank you again to everyone who has supported the project, beginning all the way back in 2020 when all we had was a mailing list and a name. Since the earliest days, people have been incredibly generous with their experience, their time, and their belief that a project like LEANS was possible and could make a meaningful difference. This project would not have been possible without community support. It still really matters to us every time we hear from someone who has used LEANS in a school, or felt it made a difference in any other way to their child, their practice, or their own views of neurodiversity. Thank you for letting us be part of your lives. This article was published on 2023-12-19
