Collaboration between parents and school staff in mainstream secondary
Published on 20 July 2022
Author: Debby Elley, Gareth D Morewood
Debby Elley is a parent of autistic twins, co-founder of AuKids magazine and an author, and Gareth D Morewood is an Educational Advisor and former SENCo. Here they discuss how collaboration between parents and school staff can support autistic young people at mainstream school.
When it comes to improving outcomes for autistic pupils at mainstream secondary schools, it’s generally thought that better autism training is the answer. We wouldn’t argue with the fact that up-to-date, high quality autism training for teachers is desperately needed.
In particular, education staff need a more complete understanding of the causes of overload - both psychological and physiological - in their autistic pupils. Although social differences are widely accepted as part of autism, dysregulation as a result of sudden changes or demands is often mistaken for troublesome behaviour.
Why we need more than training
General training should never be used in isolation, however, and here’s why.
Firstly, quality can vary hugely. We’ve heard trainers describe autism in terms of the old-fashioned ‘deficit’ model – that is, focusing on what’s ‘missing’. This implies an outdated view that autistic people are simply faulty versions of neurotypicals and any interventions should focus on ‘correcting’ them.
Good training these days is underpinned by an understanding that it’s the environment that can reduce a pupil’s ability to function, rather than any fault within the individual. It focuses on our own ability to adapt that environment. Or, as Gareth is fond of saying, ‘don’t park resilience within the autistic pupil’.
Bad training aside, there are other reasons why mainstream schools need more than just training.
Training can cover some general principles, but what it can’t do is suggest how you should react if a young person in Year 7 gets overloaded and distressed. What leads up to that point, and the factors that calm them, will be highly personal.
Plus, wouldn’t it be so much easier for everyone if they didn’t reach that point in the first place?
Collaboration
In our experience, great collaboration between schools and families is key.
Collaboration (some teachers like to call it co-production but parents don’t really use that term) is not purely a case of meeting round a table after a crisis. In fact, it’s anything but that.
If a parent’s only contact with mainstream school is when something goes wrong, they lose trust in a school’s ability to keep their child safe. That’s a blow to the parent-teacher relationship. Good collaboration means taking a proactive rather than a reactive approach to difficulties.
That approach was already being successfully used by Gareth as a SENCo when he met Debby, a similarly proactive parent whose autistic son, Bobby, attended his school.
Our collaboration worked so well that we began to discuss it – what can both schools and carers do to influence this teamwork for the better? This formed the basis of our book Championing Your Autistic Teen at Secondary School, which highlights that effective collaboration is a skill in its own right, one that shouldn’t be left to chance.
How to collaborate
From a parent perspective, good teamwork starts with getting to know key staff face to face and sharing great information up front.
Schools can be proactive by working with parents and preparing personalised ‘Stress Support Plans’ – documents that predict environmental stressors and put simple strategies in place to avoid them before they happen.
This is particularly relevant for large secondary schools, which aren’t by definition autism-friendly environments. It’s therefore not a case of if a pupil will hit an obstacle, but rather when. The trick is knowing each autistic pupil well enough to be able predict their own obstacles and remove them. This really is where collaboration comes into its own.
As SENCo, Gareth provided teachers with single page passports - an A4 sheet of paper with a photo of the pupil, describing key adaptations in bullet points and written from the child’s own perspective. These gave teachers an at-a-glance guide before and during lessons, and because they weren’t cumbersome to use or update, they were more likely to be adopted.
The key to great collaboration, however, is not just proactive preparation at the start, but ongoing communication between school and carers. These don’t need to be time-consuming gatherings around a table.
Gareth’s catch-ups with parents/carers were an informal cup of tea. They happened every 3 weeks or so, tending to last for about 15 minutes at the end of the school day. In this short time, carers and teachers shared what was going well, and identified anything that could potentially be a cause for concern. Highlighting anything that was going well helped identify good practice.
Gareth’s proactive approach continued throughout the school year, with strategies tweaked and adapted based on input from parents/carers and pupils themselves.
Effective inclusion therefore starts from within. Outside training can never be as expert as your parents; it’s simply a case of making effective use of the knowledge that’s already present.
Further information
