I recently delivered training to the wonderful Herne Hill School as part of their preparation for stating the autumn term and welcoming existing and new children back after the summer holidays. This prompted me to think about my own experiences of school as a very small child some 50 years ago, when there was little to no awareness of autistic people like myself, and how this impacted on me.
My school attendance was sporadic, patchy and chaotic, moving schools very frequently due to a 'travelling' mother that found it impossible to put down 'roots' when I was a child - difficult for any child as children thrive on stability, but for me it was a blessing and hell at the same time. A blessing because I don't think I really stayed anywhere too long to be actively bullied, hell because I really was desperate to learn, I loved it, but just when I was getting into whatever topic was current at my school, we'd move and I'd have to start all over again. It actually built my (eventual) resilience, but not in a way that I would ever advocate for or condone. I learnt to be a chameleon, to blend into the background, and I stopped speaking except for yes and no answers.
I have memories of being humiliated many, many times by teachers that were frustrated and maybe confused by me. I was told off when I was 4 for stealing maths books from the higher up classes, and not waiting for the rest of the class to catch up when I'd finished my work. I was told off at 8 when I was asked to colour in a black and white copy of the Welsh flag, but not told to specifically colour it with the same colours on the flag - resulting in purple grass with multi-coloured flowers added, extra clouds and birds in the sky, and a dragon so gloriously coloured, with every separate part of it being a different hue of the rainbow. An educational psychologists report when I was 14 that declared me 'obviously bright but disturbed', a desperate measure employed by the school to try and get to the bottom of why I acted so strangely and differently. Thinking about the backstory to that now, I still feel angry that my autism wasn't recognised, but I'm not surprised that it wasn't.
I've supported parents who come with similar horror stories today - a 9 year old boy recognising himself in an autism-awareness video played in school, and when he asked his teacher if he was autistic was told 'don't be silly, of course you're not' (and then was eventually diagnosed at 15), an SEN attendance officer for an undiagnosed boy, who insisted on being made eye contact with despite pleading from his mother (resulting in inevitable shut-down and mutism of the boy during home visits and being labelled as 'oppositional').
I could say that supporting autistic children, diagnosed and undiagnosed, well comes down to awareness and education, but I don't think that this is entirely true.
There were several teachers, that looking back with hindsight, I feel must have been autistic themselves and recognised ME, that SAW me and tried to help and protect me as best as they could. As I got older, my differences became more apparent, and by the time I was in my teens I was in serious trouble. I'd been picked out, by one of my junior school teachers, to recommend to sit a scholarship exam for a private girls school, and my mother persuaded to pay the exam fee. I passed, and went and enjoyed the best 3 years of school of my life, being given all the extra work and lessons I could swallow - joy! - and then I was taken out of the school and moved 100 miles away to a school where I had to reduce the number of subjects I was studying down from 14 to 9. I'd almost completed the GCSE syllabus for all topics I was studying, and had to go right back to the start. I was shocked at how far behind the rest of the kids were, and stopped putting my hand up to answer questions pretty quickly when I started getting ridiculed outside of the classroom. Things were going downhill quickly.
One night I was found by my english teacher running down a backroad, crying and wailing in the rain. She took me to her house and cared for me. She talked to me about how different and special I was, and how things would get easier for me once I was out of school. Those few words made all the difference to me in that moment, and for the rest of my life - she valued me for who I was and told me that I should be proud of "it". I hadn't heard those words before. I wish I could remember her name!
With my own child, I relied heavily on seeking out those sympathetic school staff who actually liked them and wanted to help - those sympathisers weren't necessarily the teachers - but it was important that there was at least one adult that my child could go to when it all got too much (and it often did!) - and it was like having a full-time second job 'negotiating' to try and protect my child's mental health while in education.
I used the same words, that the english teacher had said to me, to give my child some hope for their future after education - 'you'll grow into it bub, you'll see, it will get better' - and it has.
