A Pilot Study of the Effects of An Australian Centre-Based Early Intervention for Children with Autism

Background:  Despite the ubiquity of educationally-based early intervention programmes for children with autism there is limited empirical evidence to support their use. Where research has investigated the effectiveness of such programmes, it has predominantly been as control conditions in Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention trials (e.g. ABA). There is clearly a need to specifically investigate educationally-based autism-specific early interventions. The Australian Government has established six Autism Specific Early Learning and Care Centres (ASELCCs), including one in Brisbane, Queensland. The Queensland ASELCC opened in February 2010, and its service is provided by the AEIOU Foundation in partnership with Griffith University. The AEIOU programme follows Australian Best Practice Guidelines (Prior & Roberts, 2006) for early intervention for autism and runs an educationally-focused programme. As part of the ASELCC initiative each centre is required to conduct standardised assessments and build an outcomes evaluation strategy to assess programme effectiveness. As such, data has been collected at the Queensland ASELCC on all participating children and families.

Objectives:  The objective of this research is to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of the AEIOU programme as implemented at the Brisbane ASELCC through investigating child and family outcomes captured in the assessment conducted as part of this initiative.

Methods: Participants included parents and their children with an ASD aged 2½ to 6 years who attended the Queensland ASELCC in 2010 and exited by July 2011 (n = 10). Assessment of children’s communication, motor, and cognitive development as well as their adaptive behaviour were completed upon entry to the programme and at exit. Measures included the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales (VABS-II), Psychoeducational Profile (PEP-III), the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL), and the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ).

Results: Significant improvements at a group level were found in the level of autism symptoms with the average SCQ score improving from the clinical to non-clinical range. Consistent with this, significant improvements were also observed in PEP-3 social reciprocity standard scores. In addition, significant gains were observed in PEP-3 standard scores for cognitive/verbal communication, fine motor and visual-motor imitation skills. No significant changes in standard scores for adaptive behaviour (VABS) were observed, although there were gains in some age-equivalent subdomain scores. Changes in age-equivalent scores on receptive language on the MSEL were observed although other subscales did not significantly change over time.

Conclusions: Preliminary results suggest promising outcomes for children participating in the AEIOU programme, particularly in terms of symptom reduction and increases in educational skills. Future studies require the use of larger samples and randomised and controlled methodology. However, this small-scale Australian study contributes to the evidence-base for centre-based educational intervention for children with autism.