Ms Amy O'Keefe:

Also being autistic, I have a lot to say on it. Brian Middleton, who is quite a well-known board-certified behaviour analyst in our field, calls it middle earth because we live between the two communities.

Among some practitioners there is still a lack of understanding of why behaviour analysis is not viewed in a positive light. These can be practitioners who see nothing wrong with expecting a child to be sitting perfectly still with their hands on the table and staring at the practitioner in order to listen. There is, however, an even bigger percentage of our field who understand that fidgeting, twisting and not looking directly at the person who is talking are an autistic or divergent way of taking in information and processing information. Practices such as "Quiet hands, look at me, feet flat on the ground" can even be forced on neurotypical kids, which is totally in opposition to what we all know about child development. The majority of us know that the practices forcing this are not only unethical but really unnecessary. There is a greater understanding now about how the autistic brain operates and how we process information - I will stick to autism because it is the one that I know. I very rarely come across other practitioners who still insist on the eye contact or the still hands thing, or who insist on complying with an instruction simply because he or she gave the instruction. It is totally unnecessary. If I want to assess how a child understands prepositions I will not sit the child at a table and do discrete trial teaching, which is heavily criticised and rightly so because it is boring. I will not sit there across the table and expect a three-year-old to point to the picture of a box under a table. I will get down with the child with my Playmobil house, which I bought specifically because I love these and I could never have one as a kid. I will sit down with that house and its little people and I will assess that skill through play. If the child decides then that he or she is done with the Playmobil house I would not be focused on having to do the prepositions with the house because I had said we must do it with the house. The child may want to choose something else. If we get a train, for example, then the train can go under the tunnel and so on. It is not a teaching strategy it is a philosophy, which can be applied in everything. This is what we want.

We want to have regulations and an ethics code that our register of certificants must adhere to, in order that we will know that everybody is practising this way. If parents see something they do not like they can report the practitioner to us. If the practitioner is not adhering to a code of ethics that says he or she must practise in a way that respects the autistic person's human rights and their values, then the practitioner cannot practise, and we will take it away. Consider the Teaching Council, for example. I am a Montessori teacher. My undergraduate degree is in Montessori and I have taught in special education through Montessori for a very long time. We have the Teaching Council and if there is an issue with a teacher, it is regulated and it goes through from the staff, to the principal, the board of management and then to the Teaching Council. This is what we want. One does not continue to allow that teacher to practise unethically, because there is a code that teachers must stick to. As behaviour analysts, this is what we want. We want a code whereby somebody can say they are not happy with how a person did something. If the petitioner did not adhere to the code of ethics then he or she cannot practise any more.