History
Location The ACE Center was housed in a spare classroom at Ormerod special school in Headington, Oxford . Later it moved to moved to temporary buildings on the same site and remained there until the new 'Wooden Spoon' building was erected on Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre site in 1998. The new 'Wooden Spoon' building was largely funded by the Wooden Spoon Society and was officially opened by Princess Anne in April 1999. The new building has custom build facilities for assessment and training.
Staff The ACE Centre needs a range of expertise to be able to assess and support the clients it is involved with. It has occupational therapists, speech and language Therapists, special needs and mainstream teachers, assistive technology specialists and support staff. Early members of staff were Caroline Gray (occupational therapist, Gillian Hazell (the Nelms, Speech and Language Therapist) and Mark Saville (web page and publications creator).
Prue Fuller retired as director in 1999 and was later awarded an MBE for her services to Assistive and Alternative Communication. She was also bi-annual president of ISAAC 1998 - 2000. Caroline Grey became director of the ACE Centre following Prue's retirement until she retired in 2007. Liz Tapper took over as temporary director until September 2008 and Dr Ben Janubi has been in post since January 2009.
The CAP Project This was a government initiative to boost the support and provision of communication aids to school students. The ACE Centres were two of the organisations involved with assessment for this project. It initially had a two year timetable and a £10M budget but was extended for a further two years on the same funding basis. During this time the staffing in the centre increased considerably to cope with the assessment demand.
European projects
The Centre has a long history of collaboration with DART in Gothenburg, Sweden and has cooperated on a number of research project over the years. These include: Comspec, PCAD, WWAAC (World Wide Augmentative and Alternative Communication Project) and recently CoGain (Communication by Gaze Interaction) and ÆGIS
Read more about this topic: ACE Centre
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