It has recently come to the attention of the press and the current government of the UK that there is a high number of children who are refusing to return to school following the Covid pandemic. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about special educational needs and the paucity of provision for this large number children and young people.
In the UK, the majority of young people with autism are expected to attend mainstream schools. There are mainstream schools existing which provide accessible and helpful support for young people with autism but here, I am focusing on the vast majority which do not and which may pay lip service to the idea of supporting those with autism but fail to put this into practice. All too often even where there are aims agreed at management level and set out in the school’s prospectus, these do not translate into practice or understanding in the classroom. Even where the parent has been through the time-consuming, frustrating, drawn-out and exhausting battle to obtain an EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan) for their child, this is far from a guarantee of appropriate support or understanding of their needs. It is no better now than it was 30 years ago – indeed, it is harder to obtain an EHCP than it was to obtain a Statement of Special Educational Needs, which the EHCP replaced. It was designed to be so. The excuse was that with better support being provided by schools, fewer children would need an EHCP. Sadly, that better support did not materialise.
As a society we highly value, even over-value academic learning yet at the same time our schools fail spectacularly to nurture this in academically able students with autism. Typically, autistic children and adults soak up information like blotting paper soaks up ink when it comes to subjects in which they are interested. They very often have encyclopaedic knowledge of such subjects and that should be a key to learning. Instead, we try to force triangular students into the square holes of our educational system and then punish and discard them when they don’t fit. We throw away brilliant minds because of our own rigid and inflexible attitudes toward schooling and teaching. We should be making use of their interests and focusing on them not only for their own sake but as a means of introducing related subjects, expanding interests and as teaching tools for other subjects.
As it is, not only is mainstream education not designed to benefit the autistic child, but rather, we could not have devised a system more likely to be torture for those on the spectrum. It is another example of our way of top-down designing rather than looking at the needs of the children and how best they learn, not just what we as a society believe they should learn and how they should do this. Too many schools purport to understand autism and to support autistic children and young people, yet in practice, these young people are punished for being different, for not getting homework in on time, for being rude, for not understanding hidden rules that they were not been told about, for not trying more to fit in with the others, for being late, for being disorganised, for not wearing uniform correctly, for not having the right books for the class, for not mixing in, for not contributing to group work, for running out of class, for refusing to eat in the canteen, for behaving in ways that look odd or aggressive, for not following school rules that are illogical or irrelevant, for having meltdowns and more…
How good we are at punishing and how poor we are at investigating what underlies these behaviours and difficulties. It really is not rocket science, yet schools do not read the literature or listen to autistic people. Lack of funding is often blamed, but how much does it cost to read a few books or to go on YouTube and listen to autistic people explaining how it is for them and what helps. And the biggest irony is that if we designed schools as though all children were autistic, every child would benefit, whether autistic or not.