Ms Catriona Galster:

The idea of autistic savants or people with very specific skills is quite rare. Much of what we are doing at preschool level is helping children to communicate. Usually, the children come to us and they either do not talk or do not have reciprocal conversation skills and are not able to tell us what they need. Our children are at a very early stage and the majority of them would have the same types of IQ that the Deputy or I would have. It is a matter, however, of channelling that in a classroom situation so that the child is in a position to be able to learn. They do not learn the same way we do.

One can take the education cycle further to secondary school but I feel that the training of teachers to teach autistic children is deficient. Teachers have an amount of training in special education but not necessarily in autism and there are many autistic children who need to be taught.