More details about how it's judged

The Learning Disability and Autism Leaders’ List is judged by autistic people and people who have learning disabilities. Most, if not all, of our judges are previous Leaders.

There are 2 judges per category, that’s 8 judges in total. In addition to this there is also a mediator judge. This is somebody who can help make sure judging is fair or select winners where there are finalists with the same number of points.

Choosing the Finalists

When entries have closed it’s time to create a shortlist. Dimensions colleagues shortlist the entries. This means they read all entries and choose a selection to send to the judges. The people in this selection become our Finalists.

Where we feel there is information missing from the entry but strong potential, we contact the person who made the entry.

This is when some entries might be moved to a different category. This will only be done if it gives the entrant a better chance of success.

The final shortlisted entries are sent to the judges. The entries are put into a template so they are accessible for the judges and photos and videos are given descriptions.

Judges rank the shortlists

The judges for each category rank the shortlisted stories in order of preference, assigning them a position, which will convert to points: most points (first place) to one point (last place). They can receive help to do this from people they trust, but we ask that they keep all the stories a secret.

If the judges know the person whose story they are judging they can tell us this and their scores will be checked by the mediator judge.

The judges work independently to score the stories and send their final scores to Dimensions. We then add the scores together from the two judges for each story. This gives us final scores for every shortlisted story and determines the highest scoring stories as the winners.

Choosing the Leaders

Dimensions use the scores to find out who the Learning Disability and Autism Leaders are.

If there are any tied places (people with the same score in the same category) the mediating judge will choose which story wins.

We then tell the Leaders that they have won and work with them to create their story ready to be published. This is all secret until the stories are published!