Neurodivergent Girls, Puberty and Relationships – 90 minute training

CPD for school staff

Duration: 1.5 hours

Format: Live online, twilight-friendly

Who it’s for: All school staff – teachers, TAs, SENCOs, DSLs, pastoral and leadership

Price: £360 (no VAT) for up to 40 staff; contact us for larger groups

The challenge

Puberty often arrives early for autistic girls, and it lands just as friendships, romance and online life become a maze of unwritten rules. Research suggests autistic girls may start puberty around nine months earlier than their peers, while nearly nine in ten autistic women report experiencing sexual violence, two thirds first victimised at school age (Cazalis et al., 2022).

That risk is not something intrinsic to autistic girls. It is built by RSE that arrives too late and too vaguely, by compliance rewarded until a girl cannot say no, by safeguarding thresholds that wait for visible distress, and by phone policies that punish the victim. Every one of those is school practice, and every one can change. This training, delivered by neurodivergent trainers, shows your staff exactly how.

This training will help to

  • Understand how puberty lands differently for autistic girls – earlier onset, interoceptive differences, and the sensory reality of periods

  • Spot the pattern behind period-time absence – and respond with a support plan, not an attendance letter

  • Deliver RSE that reaches literal learners – early, literal, sensory-honest, small-group, repeated

  • Understand autistic girls’ friendships and masking – why ‘fine in school’ can be a warning sign, and why friendship conflict is a support need

  • Understand the evidence on sexual violence and exploitation – and treat a highly compliant autistic girl as a safeguarding question, not a teaching success

  • Teach consent so it actually lands – explicit naming, rehearsed scripts, and respect for the small refusals

  • Respond to disclosure safely – including why flat delivery carries no information about severity

  • Support online life as both lifeline and risk – supervising the danger without confiscating her social world

We include

  • Two structured discussion exercises and a practice segment on the first thirty seconds of a disclosure

  • A handout pack: period support plan template, RSE audit checklist, disclosure quick guide and a By Friday action list

  • A Q&A session and email support for a month following the training

What to expect

Staff will be told exactly what to expect before taking part, so that we eliminate as much uncertainty as possible (uncertainty = anxiety). The session includes discussion of sexual violence and exploitation; we handle this material plainly and carefully, with advance notice of the content.

Need the short version first? This training is also available as a 45-minute conference and INSET session. It pairs well with Autism, Girls and Keeping it All Inside, and can be adapted for health and social care teams and parent carer forums.

We are UK-based so training takes place in UK time. We can accommodate UK evening and twilight sessions; if you are in Australia or New Zealand it will need to be an early start.

If anything in this session raises concerns about a young person you support, our knowledge base, free family workshops and 36,000-strong community are open to the families around her at autisticgirlsnetwork.org.

Please contact us for more details