Dr. Teresa Mulhern:

I have done quite a bit of work on exclusion recently, because in conjunction with being a lecturer, I also do some part-time work as a behaviour consultant. Quite a few teenagers have been referred to me recently after they have been expelled from their autism units due to challenging behaviour. They have then had to try to get onto the home tuition programme, but a lot of their tutors do not have the necessary skills to work with them. Then somebody like me comes in. The whole point, from a human rights framework, is that everybody should have access to things like education, healthcare etc. In this particular scenario, I recently worked with a person who just basically could not leave his house for months on end because his behaviours were so challenging and Covid happened. I think he had not left the house for about two years. His mum had not been able to leave the house either. We worked really hard to get him back into school again. He is now full-time in school again. The point of positive behaviour support or applied behaviour analysis - we can use those two terms almost interchangeably - is to teach somebody the necessary skills in order that they do not have to engage in these challenging behaviours. For the particular individual I have referenced, whenever he would aggress, it was because he found something too difficult. All we had to do was to teach him the lámh sign for break. We saw a massive decrease in him biting, kicking, and what we would call restitutional aggression, including grabbing chairs and flinging them. Now, he is back. He was not allowed onto the school bus at one point because he was so aggressive. This is where we talk about behaviour analysis making a meaningful change. He was stuck in his house for two years. The family could not go on a day out. They are now doing that. The whole point of behaviour analysis is to move completely away from that exclusion-based model back in towards meaningful inclusion. We had to change around his curriculum so that it contained the stuff that he found interesting, for example, not just doing maths for the sake of doing maths, but including flowers as part of the lesson because he loves flowers etc. It comes back to what we were saying earlier that things should be based upon an individual's values and interests.