UK Disability Resource of Disabled Needs

Sep 7, 2007
Author: Professor Rita Jordan
With the push for full inclusion any teacher might have pupils from across the range of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) but most teachers, and those supporting them, would recognize the need for additional support and training when pupils have autism accompanied by severe or even moderate learning difficulties. However, some children with autism, and all of those with Asperger’s syndrome, do not have additional general learning difficulties, do not have a structural language disorder and may function very well academically. Their autism may be just as severe as those with classical autism and severe learning difficulties (since the severity of autism varies independently of intelligence) but, unless they have already shown emotional and behavioural difficulties, they may be expected to be ‘managed’ without additional support or training for the staff. Even when ‘support’ is provided, there may still be no-one trained to understand and really support, and the result can be a travesty of ‘inclusion’ (Jordan & Powell, 1994).

Of course, a medical diagnosis does not translate directly into a special educational need. It is right that special needs are seen as an interaction between factors within the child and the environment and will include the child’s strengths and interests as well as his or her developmental difficulties (or differences). It is a familiar paradox that the better equipped the environment to cater for individual differences and difficulties, the fewer and less severe will be the child’s special needs. But how can we reach that ‘better equipped’ state without training staff to understand? It is not just a matter of ignoring the label and working with the needs. As Jordan (2005) argues, without knowing about ASD, the teacher is going to be misled by the behaviour seen. What would be rudeness in another child is probably social naïveté in the child with an ASD; what seems like aggression (and certainly, the effects are the same!) may be panic; what appears as non-compliance is likely to be failure to attend to a social signal or a literal interpretation of an instruction. The child looks so normal and is so clever in some ways, one cannot expect a teacher or support worker to understand, unless they have been trained to do so. And if they do not understand, how can they foster understanding and support in the other children and how can they help address the child’s real difficulties while they are busy going down the wrong track?

Too often an academic model is used to assess needs. Children with Asperger syndrome may be denied support, and the staff denied training,, because the child is reading at an age-appropriate level or beyond, has a precocious vocabulary, has highly developed IT skills, is able to perform well in mathematics and may even have special talents in music or art. It is not helped by the fact that some books and authorities refer to Asperger’s syndrome as a ‘mild’ form of autism. That is not necessarily true. They may be able to use their intelligence and verbal skill to work out some social rules in the way that a child with learning difficulties as well as autism will not be able to do, but the fundamental difficulties remain the same. They do not understand the social world naturally and intuitively as we do, so having to work out social interaction makes it highly stressful, means they can only do so if given time and opportunity, and means they cannot do so while trying to work out some other cognitive task. If the child with an ASD is to learn to work in a group then that has to be the task, so what they do with the group needs to be something that they already know or is very easy for them. It is hard for others to understand how this apparently very bright child can fail at the most mundane of everyday tasks and exhibit no common sense. That is why training is necessary, to understand what will be difficult and why, and to develop strategies that will help rather than hinder.

If a teacher had a blind child in his or her class, no one would expect that teacher to understand automatically, without training and support, the differences the blindness was causing in development, or how best to assist the child. Everyone would be rightfully horrified if the teacher turned on the child and said “Look, the world, and especially education, is designed for sighted people; it would be much more convenient if you could see, so we are going to pretend you can. We can’t give you Braille training or spend time teaching you mobility, or adapt the classroom and our habits to suit your needs; we have to treat all children the same. So, here is your book for the lesson and we’ll give you a support worker to sit with you and prompt you to turn the pages at the appropriate time.” In fact we recognize this as so ludicrous that it is funny rather than horrifying; it would never happen.

Yet very similar things happen to children with ASD every day and it is regarded as acceptable. Like blindness, ASD does not just result in certain behaviours or lack of certain skills (like forming friendships), but it affects the way the brain develops and the way the child learns and understands the world. Just like blind children, children with ASD will need to learn how to manage in the ‘real’ world, but that will not come about by ignoring the real differences they experience and by forcing them to follow a process that may make no sense to them, just because it works for other children. A common example in the classroom is the child with an ASD who is forcefully made to look at the teacher (even right into the teacher’s eyes) when the teacher is talking to him/her. This works for typical children because it is generally a sign they are paying attention. It would not be insisted on for blind children, who may turn their ears to the sound but clearly not their eyes. It may be equally nonsensical for children with ASD where the face and the messages passed by eyes are things that are not understood intuitively, but have to be worked out, and may in fact lead to high anxiety and distress. The child may close his or her eyes or look down at a blank surface to attend to what the teacher is saying, but, if made to look into those confusing eyes, may lose all concentration. When children with ASD are more familiar with the teacher and are happily engaged in a task, they may be able to give eye contact easily and without losing attention, but the point is they need to be given the freedom to choose what works for them at the time; forcing a response that is not natural for them will help no-one and is liable to lead to stress and then troublesome behaviour. It is a simple adjustment for the teacher to make – no extra time, no money, no resources – but how is the teacher to know about this without training?

When I talk about ‘training’, I really mean ‘education’. There is no recipe for ASD and no magic that works for all children with ASD. No two children are completely alike and that is even more true of children with ASD, who have had to develop their understanding of the world on their own, without the benefit of the social scaffolding through which most of us learn to share a common cultural perspective. Thus, teachers should not be ‘trained’ to work with children with ASD (and especially not trained in just one approach) but should be educated to use their professional skill and judgment, harnessed to an understanding of the children they face. Training people in a method, without that underpinning of understanding,, means they become technicians rather than professionals. They can only follow what they have been trained to do and may not be able (or lack the confidence) to alter and adjust it to suit child and circumstances. Working with individuals with ASD already undermines the confidence of teachers since the skills and strategies they have developed over the years no longer seem to work with this child. Teachers need education to build their confidence that the skills they have are not wasted but just need to be managed in a different way.

It is just as hard for the teacher to teach a child with an ASD as it is for the child with an ASD to be taught. We talk of individuals with ASD ‘lacking empathy’ as if this was an attribute they uniquely possessed. In reality, it is almost impossible to feel natural empathy for someone for whom you have no understanding of how they are thinking and feeling. That is almost certainly why people with ASD lack empathy for others. Yet is that not also the case when we consider people with ASD? Do we not have equal difficulty in understanding how they think and feel? Do we not find it very hard to have empathy for them? If education, and especially inclusive education, is to be a success for pupils with ASD (and there are many wonderful examples where teachers have made it work), then we have to recognize the mutuality of this problem with empathy. Like the pupils with ASD, their teachers will not be able to rely on intuitive understanding of their pupils but will have to try and ‘work them out’ through careful observation and loving attention. I use the term ‘loving’ deliberately, because it does require a special attitude. We need to try to see things from the other person’s perspective to understand what is happening.
We need to be on the child’s side, although that does not mean that we tolerate what is intolerable. We need to teach appropriate behaviour and adherence to rules, but we can do so more effectively if we understand why the child made that ‘mistake’ and what he or she needs to be taught to understand in order not to make it again. This is difficult. It is very hard never to be able to ‘coast’ on one’s natural instinct but always to be cognitively alert and busy problem solving. However, it is also very rewarding and gives real insight into what it is like for people with ASD. In working out ways of helping pupils with ASD deal with classroom noise, in making rules and attention strategies explicit, in helping all children understand and value our differences, we will be developing as teachers (and as people) in ways that will benefit the teaching of all children. Getting things right for children with ASD, can lead to getting things right for all, including the staff. This does not mean that all mainstream staff need to be experts on ASD. However, they do need to know enough to recognize what they do not know, and when they need help; they then need ready access to someone who is an expert and who can work with the teacher to problem solve in individual situations. Sometimes this will be a specialist teacher or support professional, but it may also be the child’s parent. No-one has all the answers but we can make it work if we try together.

¬©2007 SEN Magazine

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