In joint partnership with the Sabancı Foundation, The Teachers Academy Foundation (“ÖRAV”), the Istanbul Municipality Teaching Department, Tohum Autism Foundation has launched a ‘First Steps in Education: Pre-school Integration’ project which aims to enable special needs children to co-mingle with their peers in pre-school institutions.

The project also seeks to increase the available information, skills and professional capacity of teachers who are involved in teaching special needs children to co-mingle with their peers in pre-school institutions. In connection with this we seek to contribute to children with special needs being given teaching in the same environment as their peers. This project was on-line between July 2016 and July 2017 in Istanbul.

We have trained 20 special needs INTEGRATION FORMULATORS in the first instance, and then these twenty formulators in turn spent 6 months each at 20 pre-school institutions which they chose personally. The formulators also gave out-of-school hours on the job teaching at each of their schools to supervise schools’ teachers. The project also enabled raising awareness seminars aimed at families.