Dr. Olive Healy:

The experience in school is vital for success and for setting children up for success. Sometimes, unfortunately, the systems fail. When we do see where children are experiencing very distressed behaviour and are no longer able to participate in school, that is a systems failure. That is not a failure on the part of a child. Research has significantly informed us on what can be done to prevent that, and what to do when it does occur. There are now several well-developed models available and which are being disseminated but the uptake on these is slow. However, we need to consider them. They are coming from research centres across the globe that include things like the balance programme, universal supports for people who present with severe distress and pre-school life skills programmes. These are all well-developed manualised protocols that could be put in place to prevent distressed behaviour. There is a figure available from AsIAm showing that in summer 2022 there were 800 autistic children without a school place. Many of those are probably not accessing a school place as a result of their behavioural presentation, whether that be aggression, anxiety or any of the other co-occurring difficulties that present with autism. These act as a barrier to the ability to be successful and participate in school and access all aspects of education. That is one thing we are seeing in our research, particularly as it relates to academic skills like literacy. I have done numerous studies where we have examined the literacy abilities of autistic children. I am particularly interested in autistic children who have a co-occurring intellectual disability. They seem to be very often excluded from literacy goals and curricula. We have solutions. We have curricula available that can be specialised, tailored and personalised to their complex learning needs. We need to ensure success in academic foundations and to increase the opportunities to learn. What we see from a behavioural model is that when one embeds skills or when one upskills, when one gives people a behavioural repertoire such as being able to read, write and communicate well, the challenges simply dissipate. However, these skill sets also now become so functional that there are alternatives, a wider opportunity and learning starts to accelerate. We really need to emphasis the research that looks at improving these strategies in places beyond laboratories and participation on research trials. They need to be put into schools and services. In my view these need to be available outside of the subject matter experts.