Regardless of their intellectual potential, children with ADHD often experience significant social and learning difficulties due to their specific style of perceiving and remembering information. Teachers often feel helpless in the face of the attention and classroom discipline problems associated with ADHD. This leads to lack of (mutual) understanding, stigmatization, social exclusion, and even school dropout. Over the past decades, a considerable body of knowledge about AD(H)D and supportive interventions has been accumulated in scientific and professional circles. TAC aims to contribute to adapting this knowledge for teacher education so that it can become a mainstay in mainstream school practice in the spirit of inclusive education.

The project primarily targets school and kindergarten teachers, working in primary and secondary mainstream schools and through them aims to indirectly influence children from preschool, primary and secondary stages of their education who exhibit behavioral characteristics of ADHD. In close collaboration with the Department of Information and In-Service Teacher Training at the Trakia University, we have reached more than 200 pedagogues across the country.

Neurodiversity is the topic of various CSR projects where we work to raise awareness among different groups of stakeholders to integrate neurodiverse people into the workplace. TAC builds on these projects, focusing on the early stages of formal education through direct contact with teachers. Project year 1 focuses on research of their needs and creating a competency model. Second year focuses on creating the training modules, testing and adapting them to a self-paced, interactive online course.

In the first phase of the project, we conducted a comparative study through specialized online questionnaires on teachers' perceptions, knowledge and skills for working with children with ADHD. The survey was distributed to practicing and pre-service teachers in the five countries. Based on the more than 1000 responses received, we created a competency model, carefully tailored to the main challenges teachers face, which outlines 4 key competencies needed for successful learning for both teachers and students. On the basis of this model, specialists from the two leading universities in Dublin and Cologne developed a comprehensive teacher training module including practice, which was tested with the target group (77 people in total) in 4 countries. In Bulgaria, together with DIPKU trainers, we conducted a three-day pilot training with 27 primary teachers, psychologists, speech therapists, educators and resource teachers from across the country. The process of adapting the 4 training units to an online self-study format is currently ongoing. The interactive online course will be freely available after the end of the project and will be supported by a practice-oriented manual.

The interest in the pilot training in Bulgaria was so high that we had to close the registrations just 3 days after the announcement of the training due to capacity limits. This was a strong indication of how important this topic is for teachers and how much they want and need to learn. The experience was similar in other countries. It was inspiring to see educators with more than 20 years of practice, open to innovative approaches and willing to admit that there is a lot they do not know yet. 5 months later and 3 months after the start of the school year, half of the teachers who participated in the pilot training reported an improvement in the classroom environment, better performance of their students and ease in the communication with the students concerned.