ACCT is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2026 – please help keep ACCT going for the next 20 years with a donation to our 20 for 20 campaign!
Psychologist: “I’ve been thinking about what you said about there being no out of school activities suitable for autistic children like yours”
Karen: “Oh great”
Psychologist: “And I think you should organise some”
Karen Nuttgens had already been meeting with other parents of autistic children and discussing how little provision there was in Sheffield that was suitable for neurodivergent children. So, spurred on by that psychologist’s challenge, Karen along with Deborah Woodhouse and Helen Basu-Chaudhari, agreed to set up a group to address that need.
They formally established ACCT (then called Asperger’s Children and Carers Together) on 20 June 2006, got busy with some grant applications and raised the money to open an office at St Mary’s in November 2006. In the very early days, ACCT provided a library of resources for families and ran monthly meetings for parents and carers, getting involved in campaigning and initiatives with Ryegate and other partners, such as establishing a telephone service for carers of newly diagnosed children. With additional grant funding secured, ACCT was then able to start offering a weekly drop-in session for parent-carers, beginning in January 2007.
The original ACCT logo
Acctivate held its first session on 19th May 2007. This was ACCT’s most ambitious project so far, with three paid staff members and 11 volunteers delivering each session. A grant from the Four Acres Trust via South Yorkshire Community Foundation helped cover the costs of Acctivate in these early days.
Following the success of this, the ACCT team started a siblings club to run alongside Acctivate, beginning in November 2007.
Now a growing organisation with responsibilities for staff and ongoing activities supporting children and families, ACCT became a registered charity in April 2008.
As Acctivate and the siblings club became more popular, the team began to develop ideas for a teenage youth club in response to the needs of ACCT members and particularly those young people attending Acctivate but getting too old for that club. Teenage Club began in 2009, with a grant from Lloyds TSB Foundation supporting this as an initial pilot.
The small ACCT team of staff and trustees began to engage with the Aiming High for Disabled Children team at Sheffield City Council and were able to successfully apply for a tender to run Acctivate on a fortnightly basis and properly establish Teenage Club as a fortnightly session.
Funding also allowed ACCT to buy and set up a new IT suite for clubs including PCs, cameras and music, film and animation software, and started running music and film clubs.
ACCT moved its office base from St Mary’s to Sheffield Carers Centre at Bells Court in 2009/10, although our groups continued to be run from St Mary’s. We moved the office back to St Mary’s in 2013 and we’ve been there ever since.
In 2010, ACCT also started running family trips for the first time with a day out to Cleethorpes and a trip to the cinema. And in 2011, ACCT ran its first drama club for autistic young people during one half-term.
At this time, Archer Road Sainsbury’s made ACCT their charity of the year. Every little helps!
By 2013, ACCT had piloted some sports activities for young people. Acctivate and Teenage Club were both growing in popularity and regularly reaching capacity. The team were able to respond to this clear need, successfully raising more grant funding to be able to make Acctivate and Teenage Club weekly sessions, with alternate weeks funded by a Sheffield City Council contract or by grants from a wide range of sources.
ACCT’s campaigning role shifted at this time to focus more on supporting the work of Sheffield Parent Carer Forum and encouraging members to engage in relevant local initiatives such as the work towards an Autism Strategy for under-18s in 2014.
Family swimming began in 2014, becoming a monthly session. The team worked hard to make sure we were fully compliant in all areas when inspected by Ofsted. And 2014-15 was a momentous year for ACCT for one other reason: Nicola Hough was appointed as Project Coordinator!
ACCT publicity leaflets
ACCT turned 10 years old in 2016. By this point, the organisation had grown significantly and established a number of popular activities. Acctivate had more than 1,800 attendances in 2015-16 with more than 1,350 attendances at Teenage Club. Parent-carer meetings continued to run monthly and a range of family trips and activities were on offer. ACCT’s membership had grown to 400 families. Looking ahead to the next stage of development, the team made plans to become a charitable incorporated organisation and set out a strategy for the next phase of ACCT’s development.
In 2016-17, ACCT started working with Sheffield Wednesday FC Community Programme to run football sessions during Acctivate. This was a response to the need and demand from the many young people who were interested in football but had found mainstream clubs inaccessible. The popularity of these sessions was immediately obvious and we sought funding to make this into a separate football group in its own right, playing at Goals Sheffield. This group has continued ever since, now delivered by our own ACCT coaches and called ACCT Academy, with a younger pitch and a teenager’s pitch every Friday (except when the weather conspires against us!)
In March 2019, we were all very sad to lose David Woodhouse, the husband of ACCT co-founder Deborah, and himself a tireless supporter of ACCT and other autism and SEND-related causes in Sheffield. We instituted the David Woodhouse Volunteer Award in his honour, a monthly award to recognise the hard word and dedication of ACCT volunteers.
A donation made to ACCT by Deborah Woodhouse in David’s memory allowed us to set up ACCTing Out, our fortnightly social group for young adults. This group really fulfilled a significant need for young people who were now too old for Teenage Club and were leaving education and were at risk of losing all the friendships and connections they’d made. ACCTing Out continues to this day and has gone from strength to strength.
Something happened in 2020, didn’t it? What was it now? Ah, yes. So, when the global Covid-19 pandemic really hit and the UK went into the initial lockdown in March 2020, we quickly established a new programme of online sessions – including Minecraft, Dungeons & Dragons, arts & crafts and more – that enabled families to keep connected to ACCT and to one another during this incredibly difficult time.
We were able to reopen in-person Acctivate, Teenage Club and ACCT Academy Football sessions safely as soon as guidance allowed in July 2020. We implemented two ‘bubbles’ per session with reduced capacities at Acctivate and Teenage Club.
Masked up and socially distanced at Acctivate
We found that the online Minecraft and Dungeons & Dragons groups we had set up during lockdown were so popular and were delivering such strong outcomes that we kept them going, working hard to bring in grants to fund these new groups.
We had also started delivering fortnightly Parent-carer peer support meeting over Zoom, replacing our previous quarterly in-person sessions; this too proved to be a change which really worked for many parent-carers.
In 2021, we partnered with renowned theatre company Forced Entertainment to begin delivering a Drama Club for autistic teenagers, again responding to the need identified by young people and families who had found mainstream theatre and drama groups have less accessible for autistic young people.
InterACCT Drama Group
We officially changed our name from Asperger’s Children and Carers Together to Autistic Children and Carers Together in 2023. The other main changes around this time were responding to the popularity of our autism-friendly family swimming sessions by running sessions every two weeks instead of every month, and adding new in-person Dungeons & Dragons sessions at Patriot Games and alongside Teenage Club.
That pattern of activities has been fairly stable to this day, with Acctivate, Teenage Club, ACCT Academy football, Dungeons & Dragons (and other games), InterACCT Drama (now working with A Mind Apart), ACCTing Out young adults’ groups, parent-carer meetings and workshops, and family activities including swimming and other trips all continuing.
The need for ACCT support has grown and grown as autism awareness and identification has improved and more families have been able to seek support at an earlier stage. We have been proud to be able to develop our clubs and activities to try to meet these growing needs; we now support more than 500 young people and over 250 parent-carers and family members every year.
So, happy 20th birthday to ACCT and our heartfelt thanks to all the people who have been part of the ACCT story so far: the trustees, staff members, volunteers, supporters and funders, and of course the young people and families who have brought such joy to our work.
Summer 2026 – Nicola and Danny with the three ACCT founders – Helen, Karen and Deborah
ACCT is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2026 – please help keep ACCT going for the next 20 years with a donation to our 20 for 20 campaign!
