Educating the Autistic: Before and After Diagnosis
I should warn you before we get started: This isn’t going to be pleasant. What I’m writing about here happened years ago and is making me cry. But I’ve been assured that I’m not the only person with autism with experiences like these. I’m sure it’ll help someone to know that they’re not the only one who was traumatised by school as a result of autistic ‘idiosyncrasies’ and their school’s response to them. Talking it over in therapy and writing about it is retraumatising me, but the hope is that it helps me and, potentially, others.
So, who am I, to encapsulate a lot of autistics’ (and presumably, other neurodiverse people’s) experiences of education? I am a final-year DPhil student in History. Previously, I did BA Oriental Studies (Egyptology) here at Oxford and MA Archaeology at Liverpool. I grew up and went to school in North Yorkshire. And I was diagnosed with autism in the second year of my DPhil.
Receiving my diagnosis is the most liberating thing that has ever happened to me. It was a flood of relief as everything up until that point started to make sense. But after the relief came the anger and the grief at what could have been if I’d known sooner. Given that I was doing my DPhil when I was diagnosed, most of the ‘what if’ question revolves around what was so wrong with my experience of education.
We’re going to catapult back in time now. Primary school was reasonably uneventful, but the moment that I started at secondary school (at 11 years old) everything changed.
My teachers had always remarked on how quiet I was and how they weren’t sure if I understood their lessons, but my mother assured them that I understood everything just fine. But I was always exhausted when I got home from school, whereas the other kids had boundless energy. I needed to decompress; at secondary school, I did this by ranting. My mother didn’t understand it but she let me vent. Now we both understand that my social energy was worn out after a regular day at school.
I have always needed to know exactly where and how things are organised and when things are happening. This need for order and planning has been a necessary source of security for me. In every class at school, I had to arrange my pencil case, diary, and exercise books in exactly the same way. Everything still has its rightful place on my desk!
I’ve also always been very eager to share my knowledge of subjects I love, which was frequently construed by less enthusiastic pupils as ‘geekish’ and by teachers as ‘showing off’. Looking back, I did that so much in GCSE History it’s embarrassing, so I guess it’s a good thing that I’m now able to channel my zeal into my DPhil and also getting to teach.
The main problem at secondary school and during my GCSEs (ages 14 to 16) was the classroom itself. Perhaps I should stress here that I wanted to be at school. I was a bona fide Hermione Granger, always getting high grades and praise from the teachers. I think my teachers were genuinely concerned that my parents were pushing me, but it was all me. Maybe that should have been a clue in itself!
The other kids didn’t seem to have the same feelings about learning as me. Every lesson was screaming from them and screaming from the teacher. Stuff was thrown, kids ran around the room, and there was basically a revolving door as the usual suspects were told to leave over and over again. Amongst all of this, I was doing my work. Teachers continued to praise my behaviour and my work but, when my class had to miss lunch or was kept back after school, so was I. This created a paradox in that no matter how well I behaved or how hard I worked, I was punished. The school’s reasoning was that, if everyone was punished, the well-behaved students would hate the poorly-behaving ones and make them behave. This followed the same logic as making every class except Maths and Science ‘mixed-ability’, so that the high-achieving kids would support the low-achieving ones. This didn’t work. It made the well-behaved students hate the teachers for putting them through it. I’ve tutored in schools, although I stopped when I realised that I was getting flashbacks and that probably wasn’t healthy. I appreciate that there are plenty of kids who aren’t happy at home and feel safer at school. I was the opposite.
Because I was doing spectacularly well, no one noticed that I was miserable. Or, if they did, they didn’t address it. And it’s hard to believe that they didn’t notice, or that they didn’t realise that I was exhibiting behaviours that suggested that all was not well. At a point in every lesson, I would start crying. I didn’t want to make a fuss, so I’d sit crying silently (and messily) until someone noticed. And then, like so many other students, I’d leave the room. Of course, everyone wanted to know what was wrong, but I couldn’t tell them. My mother’s theory, which I and the teachers accepted as perfectly logical, was that I was so angry at everyone else’s behaviour that I snapped. It wasn’t until I was diagnosed that I knew the real reason: I was experiencing sensory overload from the noise and having a meltdown. In each and every lesson. No wonder I was so tired when I got home!
It’s probably no wonder then, that, one morning, I actually refused to go to school. Because of my school’s decision to make almost everything mixed-ability, I was with my form group for everything except Maths and Science. Every lesson was just screaming. And I couldn’t take it anymore. My parents had to arrange a meeting with the school to move me to a different form group. My form teacher initially told my parents that there were no issues like those which I described, but one look from my mother was sufficient for him to acknowledge that it was exactly as I was saying it was.
Again and again, teachers would take me aside and tell me that they weren’t angry with me but they continued to scream at me and punish me. I understood what they were saying, but the sensory overload was the biggest problem and that didn’t occur to me or to them. Only one teacher ever tried a different approach. My GCSE DT (Design and Technology) teacher told me the same spiel as the other teachers, and I told him that teachers had been telling me that for three years already and it hadn’t worked. So, from then on, every time that he screamed at the class, he let me leave the room first. The door being between the screaming and I was enough to stop me from overloading.
So, when other teachers weren’t so supportive, it was my DT Teacher whom I went to. I only ever stormed out of two lessons, and one of those was GCSE English. The teacher didn’t even make it through taking the register before it was too loud. Once I’d left the room and the adrenaline was dying down, I didn’t know where to go, so I went to my DT teacher. He let me stay in his classroom until the end of the lesson and even went into the English class to collect my things so that I didn’t have to go back into the room.
Then, what about when school was actually supportive? Well, that only happened once, really, but if ever it was going to help me it chose a good time to do it. The school provided fantastic support with our UCAS applications, especially for Oxbridge applicants. It put us into a separate class to write our personal statements for the early deadline and organised mock interviews. Arrogant as it might sound, it was a pleasant change to finally be recognised for my abilities and hard work without also having to miss lunch or the school bus. That change didn’t last, though. Once I’d received my offer, the school went from supportive to punitive. If teachers didn’t think that I was working hard enough at meeting my offer, which was well below the grades that I was predicted to get, I was threatened with detention. That might not sound like much, but for someone who’d determinedly done their schoolwork since they first started school even when they were punished for it, it was devastating that that was how I was being incentivised.
In the final half-term break before our exams, which like all half-terms was a week long, one of my A Level English Literature teachers assigned us new books to read. I’m all for reading if you’re studying English Literature, but introducing new material six weeks before the exam, when we should have been revising, was panic-inducing. It’s the only time I deliberately didn’t do my homework and my classmate who had an offer for English Literature at Cambridge, with whom I regularly didn’t see eye-to-eye, felt exactly the same as me.
When the teacher decreed that we had to read the material or face detention, instead of understanding the pressure we were under, both he and the head of Sixth Form (the coordinator of everyone’s A Levels) doubled down. A few weeks later, we wrote the best exam essays they’d ever seen, but we hadn’t needed the new material to do it. This was the same English Literature teacher who ruined my attendance record by continually marking me as late or even absent because I wasn’t in his lessons thirty seconds after the bell rang. I was the only student in the class doing four A Levels instead of three, and the only one who always had another lesson immediately before his on the other side of the school. Even though I explained this to him, in the end the only thing that I could do was leave the preceding class earlier which shouldn’t have been necessary. So, I met my offer to come to Oxford despite my teachers, rather than because of them.
My experience of the DPhil has been the opposite. My supervisors were already supportive, but since I got diagnosed my primary supervisor, whom I see significantly more than my secondary one, has tried to meet my needs. The Disability Advisory Service made a support plan for me and through all the stresses of his many teaching responsibilities he’s trying to abide by it and get other academics to do the same, especially when I’m examined. We’ve also had a useful dialogue about how he provides feedback on my work. I’m a perfectionist by nature, but it was reinforced for so long at school that his original somewhat brutal way of providing feedback wasn’t helpful because I’d focus on everything that needed improving rather than what I’d already done well. This has made a big, positive difference to my baseline stress levels and my perception of my own abilities so I’m glad that my supervisor and I had that conversation and that he’s so supportive.
The kind of conversation that I had with my supervisor is what should have happened while I was at school. Every teacher should have been asking what would have been helpful when I was clearly distressed or under a tremendous amount of pressure, not just the one who taught me for GCSE DT. And the classroom should’ve been the last place in the school that was disruptive. There’s no single solution to that, but at my school the problem was that the teachers were receiving no support in dealing with the disruptive students. Top-down management of situations like that is essential so that everyone can learn, not just neurodiverse students like me. Even just knowing that I was autistic and therefore knowing why I was behaving in certain ways would have been helpful. I didn’t know that it was even possible to ask a supervisor to change the way that they provided feedback until Trinity Term 2021!
And here we are at the ‘what if’ again. I’ve suggested a couple of things that would’ve been indispensable to me at school, but I don’t know if they would have happened. At my school, the students with learning difficulties and disabilities were separated from everyone else and considered to be a lost cause. I would hope that my academic capabilities would’ve meant that that didn’t happen to me, but the one time that I did speak to the school’s SENCO (Special Educational Needs Coordinator), she blackmailed me into not complaining about the very GCSE English teacher whose classroom I stormed out of by telling me that I wouldn’t be allowed to do A Level English Language and English Literature.
I’m glad that I know that I’m autistic. It recontextualised my experiences of school and explained them. The problem with that recontextualization is that it’s retraumatising me. It’s not as simple as living through all of these events again in my head and then it’s over with, though. It comes in waves, over and over again, and it will for a long time yet. So, I suppose the takeaway should be that those of us who share such experiences have got as far as we have despite our experiences of education and have earned the right to wave two fingers at the teachers who didn’t help us. And the teachers who did help us have our eternal respect and thanks for thinking outside the box. The hope would be that such simple solutions to making neurodiverse students’ lives easier will soon be found in the box too.
