Towards an inclusive autism education agenda

Autistic people have a different way of understanding, processing, and interacting with the world. Autism is reportedly on the rise among children and young people across the United Kingdom but education systems have yet to adapt their practices and policies to deliver fully inclusive education.

For instance, the National Autistic Society’s 2021 Education Report highlighted that 74% of parents did not believe that their autistic child was fully supported at school whilst only 8% of autistic children and young people believed their fellow pupils had an adequate understanding of autism.

Autistic people can be subject to stigma and exclusion by both peers and teachers, taking a range of forms from the use of language that presents autism as a ‘problem’ to the excessive use of exclusion policy which can cause frustration and confusion in students.

Researchers at University of Birmingham are providing empirical research and practical support to address these gaps and inform best practices to ensure that autistic students in the UK and beyond receive the highest standard of education possible.

Collaboration and the person-centred approach

Autistic children and young people are two times more likely than those without diverse educational needs and disabilities to experience exclusion from school. The University of Birmingham’s Autism Centre for Research and Education (ACER) project on school exclusion for autistic children emphasises the emotional impact of exclusion on autistic children and their parent-carer families, and identifies gaps in the educational system overall.

Research informed through engagement with and direction by people with lived experience of autism is crucial to designing more inclusive education environments. Karen Guldberg, Professor of Autism Studies at the University of Birmingham, says researchers worked with an expert panel of young people with diverse autistic needs “to discuss every aspect of the research project and the findings and talk to them about how we could communicate those findings more broadly across the world”.

The Unfiltered Lives Project, which highlights the positive impact on individual lives from University of Birmingham research, also amplifies the voices of autistic people by examining the impact of educational barriers at different ages. Such projects can reframe the narrative of autism in academia and society. “Autism is not a disorder. [We are] turning around the perception of autism as something faulty and problematic, to being more celebratory, even when you realise that it causes difficulty for an autistic person”, Professor Guldberg says.

Teacher support

Practical impact and support is critical to enabling positive change, with teacher support and training among the key interventions to support inclusive practices, including the introduction of pedagogical tools to challenge misperceptions and stereotypes and provide personalised support to students. “I think the system itself is quite broken, but there's a lot of teachers that do really, really good work, and often they're really crying out for more guidance,” argues Guldberg.

She advocates upskilling teachers so they “have tools that help them to identify needs much earlier on, and to therefore also have pathways through which they might approach and work with those children and young people.” University of Birmingham researchers have produced multiple Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses to help teachers. Professor Guldberg has worked closely with the Autism Education Trust partnership to lead and develop a national training programme for educators in England. Over 400,000 educators have undertaken this programme. The work has also included the development of a set of standards for settings and a set of competencies for practitioners.

“It's not about curing or making the students on the autistic spectrum behave in a specific way, it’s about being aware of how the context affects how the individual learns and facilitates learning. We’re talking about understanding the individual and using the autistic lens often to see how you might be able to support that person,” Dr Prithvi Perepa, Associate Professor of Autism Studies at the University of Birmingham, emphasises. Collaborative research-based support and provision in Wales, and adapted versions in Abu Dhabi and Poland, have also been rolled out, as outputs arising from partnerships between the Autism Education Trust (AET) and ACER.

Technology can be a helpful aid too. Beyond pedagogical practices, technologies such as robotics are an emerging tool to support inclusive education for autistic children and young people. “The robot does some of the things that human beings or teachers aren't always that good at when they work with an autistic child, including giving more processing time,” explains Professor Guldberg. Interacting with robots means less pressure to focus on body language, eye contact, and intonation, and often “the communication is more straightforward”.

Professor Guldberg is working with partner organisations on one such project in a special school in Norway. “The teachers are creating the pedagogy of how they think the robot should be and can be embedded in the classroom, but also how to develop the robot further for it to be useful in the education of autistic learners.” The combination of technology, teacher support and collaborative and thoughtful international research combine to transform how autistic children and young people are understood, taught and treated.

Autism across borders

There are global dimensions to autism education, accounting for cultural and social differences in attitudes and perspective. Much academic research on inclusive education and autism is from the US and the UK, but as Dr Perepa asks, “how do we know that what works with autistic individuals in those contexts would work for everybody across the world?”

To inform international evidence on the topic, Dr Perepa, alongside Dr Sarah Benson from the University of Birmingham’s Dubai campus, conducted a project on teacher preparedness for teaching pupils diagnosed with autism in Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates.

In doing so, he questioned the dominance of the ‘West’, pointing out that inclusive education as a concept “emerged from us, and it emerged sociologically at the place where it was appropriate for the way our educational systems were working. But it is imposed across the world in a blanket approach.” Although research on autism in the UAE is limited, the available research shows that diagnoses are also increasing in the region.

His findings show that in Ras Al Khaimah, teacher knowledge on autism is not comprehensive, partly because of language barriers as the literature is predominantly in English. Dr Perepa notes the influence of linguistic and cultural factors such as religion and ideology. “In Arabic, autism is called توحد [pronounced ‘tawahad’], which means within oneself. So, teachers in our project were presuming that autistic students don't want to be with anybody else, because the terminology comes with a specific way of understanding autism.” In this way, Dr Perepa points out, inclusion in school is sometimes limited and opinions on autism are shaped by cultural perspectives. Dr Perepa and Dr Benson’s findings indicate that teachers are concerned about how to provide additional support to some students when needed due to communication or behavioural differences, and have limited knowledge of autism in some areas, partially due to a lack of appropriate information. However, teachers also indicated that they believed that inclusive education was important.

To address research biases towards Anglophone countries, Dr Perepa and Dr Benson’s report was translated into Arabic to inform policy makers and family members, and teacher training sessions were also offered. Recommendations included a call for more government funding to support the training of teachers and develop specialist support, such as speech and language therapy services, to improve education for those with diverse needs.

As Dr Perepa concludes, “policy work does not happen in a day, but hopefully if we keep adding evidence continuously, perhaps we will have a bigger impact in terms of how things can be changed, based on what is required locally.”

The Autism Centre for Education and Research (ACER), based within the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, is a world-leading centre focused on research, teaching and engagement activities that are designed to make a genuine difference to the lives of autistic people and those who support them. The centre is directed by Professor Laura Crane.