Autism

What you see at home is evidence too

Many autistic children and young people work extremely hard to hold things together in school. Staff may see a quiet, compliant pupil who is “fine”. Parents see what happens afterwards: exhaustion, distress, shutdown or explosive release once the school day is over.

That difference between school and home is one of the most common things parents bring to me, and one of the most misunderstood. It doesn’t mean school is wrong or that parents are exaggerating. It usually means the need is being expressed somewhere other than where the support is.

My Master’s in SEND and Inclusion included a postgraduate autism specialism. My postgraduate enquiry focused particularly on autism in girls, masking and complex presentation: the children whose needs are easiest to overlook because they don’t look like the textbook picture.

What good autism support looks like

Good support isn’t a list of strategies that could apply to any autistic pupil. It starts from this child’s sensory profile, communication, anxiety and the specific points in the day where things become hard, and then asks whether the provision in place actually addresses those things.

• Are the reasonable adjustments removing barriers, or just written down?
• Is support planned around unstructured times, transitions and changes, not only lessons?
• Does anybody know what overwhelm looks like for this pupil before it becomes a crisis?
• Is behaviour being understood in context, or managed in isolation?
• Is the impact of the support being reviewed, and by whom?