Professor Sarah Parsons BSc, PhD
Professor of Autism and Inclusion
Sarah Parsons is Professor of Autism and Inclusion within Southampton Education School at the University of Southampton, and formerly the Deputy Head of School for Research.
Sarah has longstanding research interests in the educational experiences of children, young people and adults on the autism spectrum and their families, and children with special educational needs and disability more generally. She also has significant research experience in the development and application of innovative technologies for promoting inclusive practices for children with and without autism and is skilled in the development and application of child-centred methodologies for accessing the views of children with special educational needs. Sarah is especially interested in working in collaboration with others and most recently has co-led the development of the Autism Community Research Network @ Southampton [ACoRNS]. Funded initially by the University of Southampton's Public Engagement with Research unit, ACoRNS is a unique education-focused initiative, launched in 2017, that brings together researchers and practitioners to jointly develop projects of direct relevance to autism practice and policy. ACoRNS is co-directed with Dr Hanna Kovshoff (Psychology) and founding partners New Forest School and Aviary Nursery. Subsequently, ACoRNS has added six partners to span the range of statutory educational provision from nursery to Further Education, including mainstream and specialist settings.
Our vision is that when partnerships between researchers and practitioners are truly founded on the principle of co-construction, they grow into strong and sustainable mutually informing working relationships. These relationships are further enhanced when children's voices are placed at the centre of this work. To achieve the vision, we work on four interconnected branches of research-practice activities that are jointly designed and implemented: (1) Growing student researchers through research and teaching, (2) Securing funding to sustain and support specific projects, (3) Practice-informing dissemination, and (4) Monitoring and evaluating the research-practice cycle. So far, we have supported many student projects across Bachelor's, Masters and Doctoral levels with major success: one of our BSc students won a University impact prize for her dissertation in 2019, and we published another BSc dissertation project as a peer-reviewed paper (Hoy et al., 2018). We have also secured research funding for innovative projects; published peer-reviewed papers (Parsons et al., 2019; Parsons & Kovshoff, 2019); led workshops with over 300 practitioners; won funding from the ESRC for two Festival of Social Science events; and included the ACoRNS knowledge co-construction model and its co-produced evidence in teacher and educational psychologist training at the University.
Current and recent research includes:
- The Autism Community Research Network @ Southampton [ACoRNS]
- The Froebel Trust project developing digital stories to support the transitions of autistic children from nursery to primary school:
- An Epilepsy Research UK Pilot project exploring the lived experiences of children with epilepsy, their parents and siblings.
- An ESRC-funded seminar series focusing on innovative technologies for autism: http://digitalbubbles.org.uk/
- The Horizon2020-funded project ProSocialLearn focusing on developing serious games for supporting inclusion