Welcome to the sixth and final seminar in Excluded Lions series that you've been running since just before the Christmas lights.
Qatar is a large multi-site in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales,
multi-disciplinary everything from assembling work, rural economics and criminology.
All sorts of different versions of education, human geography, social policy trying to get as the name of the project implies,
a much more holistic overview of the lives, the consequences, the lives of young people who get excluded from school and by exclusion.
We don't simply mean parents or experience exclusion.
We always refer to somebody else and ask to leave the classroom, which actually in Wales,
40 percent of children are asking the question, which is an interesting point.
So the same thing is talked about from inclusion to exclusion, transforming the lives of young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
This is being led by Chris Morris and Jo Porter, who is a former teacher,
doctoral researcher and member of Parenting, especially children with particular emphasis on young people.
And Jim Fawcett was. Professor University of Redding has moved here as an honorary research of its
work on the principle of working over the sanity aspects of the of the project.
So there's almost nothing wrong with girls, so we usually speak.
The speakers speak for about 45 minutes and then it's time for questions after.
Thank you very much. Thank you. And I'll start my time totally at the time.
It's interesting. I was kind of at one point I was thinking, Well, I see a sandy session coming last in this series,
you know, because they account for almost half of children who are excluded from school.
So it kind of felt a bit odd that actually everybody else was talking about perspectives of inclusion, and the Sun came at the end.
But since then, I've kind of thought, actually, it's a good thing because it it draws on all the ones, all the presentations that have gone before.
So I'm kind of thinking that in some ways there'll be some things that come out of today that people will have heard before,
and I kind of apologise for that because it's drawing. It does draw on strands from previous presentations.
One of the things I'm very conscious of is that and why it's got slightly odd title is that the narrative you're kind of showing my age here,
the narrative. When we talked about at the end who is used to be about inclusion and developing schools that were the needs of diverse learners.
So we were very much at the end inclusion then. And suddenly today, when we talk about CND, the focus seems to be so much on exclusion.
And one of my concerns that kind of underpins when we look for explanations about why children with special educational needs is so overrepresented.
One of my concerns is that actually we stop thinking about how we make good learning environments to thinking about how we cater for additional needs,
with an emphasis on the bureaucratic procedures that fall behind that actually,
rather than on anything that might be about encouraging good provision.
So that's why there's a kind of slightly odd title.
The other caveat to say is that both of us are talking from the perspective of pupils that are in secondary education.
So I apologise to anybody who's sitting here who's got a primary focus,
and data is exclusively UK data, although the English data, although the project is across the UK.
So what I'm going to do is to look at how all this kind of raft of publications have attempted to
explain what it is that's happening when it comes to children that are being excluded from school.
I'm going to look at it what? I'm going to look at it from two levels.
And Ruth is going to pick up on the third level.
So I'm going to look at the kind of macro level, first of all, in terms of what we learn from these big policy reports and government statistics.
And then I'm going to kind of move down a level to thinking about what we've learnt in Harry and myself,
in fact, through research that we've done at a school level about SIMD and inclusion exclusion.
And then Ruth. Let's be careful to say here is going to do very much thinking about kind of at a at a at an individual level.
So thinking about the voices of young people who've been excluded. She's particularly thinking about goes on the autistic spectrum.
OK. But first of all, this may feel odd because I'm sure that you're all very familiar with the definition of special educational needs.
If people who were here last week remember that Lucinda made this very strong case that when it comes to skin,
the children are protected if you like, safeguarded their needs is safeguarded legally through the Children and Families Act.
And we know this definition of special educational needs has been around for a long time.
A child or young person has a special educational need if he or she has a learning difficulty or disability,
which causes special educational provision to be made for her.
It's a very kind of circular definition. I'm sure statisticians would like something that's quite much more specific because,
of course, it depends on the context in which the child finds themselves.
The extent to which actually they need special educational provision, which means, of course, there's huge variation in what children receive.
Interestingly, the Children of Families Act don't define disability, is it labelled firmly on the front end?
But disability is not defined parents so case there was any doubt what a parent was seeing is not if we want a definition of disability,
we need to challenge the equality and human right condition.
And I don't apologise for putting this up because when we were involved in a lot of research in schools,
actually schools didn't necessarily understand at that point what a disability was.
It tended to be equated to children in a wheelchair.
The important thing about this being that it's first and foremost a child has a physical mental impairment, but it's not that on its own,
which determines the child has a disability is actually the impact of that impairment or physical and mental health condition.
The impact being that it has an adverse effect on a person's ability, chance ability.
You can tell this was written up for an adult audience, a child's ability to participate in normal day to day activities and disability.
Data collection research identified the fact that although culturally,
the government now puts D on the end of a C and D actually there's overlapping groups.
Not all disabled children fall within having a special educational need.
OK. And for prevalence, which I think is highly relevant to discussions today,
we've got a very static line of children who go through a formal assessment process.
Two point eight percent The amber line along the bottom there who have more complex needs.
But we've got a much more varied profile for children who don't have complex needs but are recognised as having a special educational need.
And we see that that peaked in 2010, at which point if people remember, Ofsted said.
We're recognising too many people with too many children with special educational needs,
and we then see a fall and another particular fall at 2014, when actually the category of C in.
Without a statement, without being formally recognised, ceased to be two categories and became one category.
People remember we used to talk about ACM. Thank you.
And see an action in action plus.
Yeah, thank you. Whereas now we just talk about science support so suddenly that group of children seem to have disappeared from the system,
that group that were recognised in school as having a special educational need and who needed things at the school level that were different,
but for whom other people weren't part and parcel of analysing the difficulties at a stroke.
Those children have disappeared out of data collection,
they've kind of ceased to cease to exist in terms of skin, hence the fact that we see a fall at 2014.
So you might think, oh, yes, great government might think great, yes.
The instance of ASEAN is going down, but the reality of it is that it's jus definitions, as we might predict.
What I can't do is provide you with data that goes on, right, well, what about children with a disability?
Because of course, the government system of collecting that is not on educational terms,
it's not until a young person reaches the age of 16 or 18 that in fact,
the data exists about children with students with a disability and their educational outcomes.
I put this up just to show you data from Alice Black's analysis about the ways in which
the the percentage of children being educated in special schools is increasing again,
quite a sharp rise from about 2010. Interestingly. Yeah.
That the proportion. So when we talk about exclusion,
actually this is this is part of the picture that increasingly children are being admitted to and educated in special school settings.
When it comes to looking at the exclusion data, so these are permanent exclusions.
I've done it from 2010 to 2018, and you see that steepest level of rise.
Maybe, unsurprisingly, when it comes to permanent exclusions, are those children with ASEAN support.
Although exclusion overall has increased the steepest rises.
Those children, although there is when it comes to permanent exclusion, an increase for those who formally recognise the ACP group.
And the data at the moment suggests that pupils with less than support have the highest permanent
exclusion rate and those six times higher than the rate for pupils with no special educational needs.
And when it comes to looking at children with it, UHC plan, they've got the highest fixed period exclusion rate.
So fixed parity exclusion rate, and that's five times higher. And that's just a graph that kind of illustrates the.
And, of course, as part of the picture. So I kind of what I'm doing is scene setting, and so I guess is definitely a problem here.
So there's all sorts of unofficial and other forms of exclusion that are happening.
Children experiencing isolation rooms being sent home to calm down or cool off, or because there's nobody to look after them off rolling is going on,
etc. with their being the overrepresented in the group that are withdrawn from school to be home educated.
Oop. So let's put an analysis about what's happening in the context of what we know about special educational needs.
As part of the government review process,
the select committee has reported on what they think is happening actually a pretty damning picture of what's contributing to exclusion,
but also what's going wrong in the world.
You might recognise this quote from the 2014 reforms have resulted in confusion and at times unlawful practise, bureaucratic nightmares,
buck passing and a lack of accountability, strained resources and adversarial experiences, and ultimately dashed the hopes of many.
And what they see as the problem is actually not the reforms themselves,
that actually what they were intended to do and their aspirations were good aspirations, which they would stick by.
So there's nothing wrong with the act. It's about the implementation. So the implementation of the Code of Practise and.
I've never read actually such damning comments about the DFA.
We do not think the DFA is taking enough responsibility for ensuring that its reforms overseen the department has left it to local authorities,
inspectorates parents in the courts to operate and police the system.
I think it's a useful turn of phrase that kind of the system needs policing the intense focus on educational,
health and care plans, and the transition date has led to the children honesty and support being neglected.
They do talk about the fact that there should be a cultural change in what's happening.
But what they don't mean is it is it the cultures of schools changing, but the culture of buck passing of unlawful practise needs to change.
So that if you like, is a failure of policy implementation, if you look, oh, I've done it again.
If you look at the National Audit Office review, as you would imagine, this is all about funding and how funding is being used.
So the explanation of the difficulties in SIMD provision is that funding hasn't kept pace with a rise in pupil numbers.
In fact, they talk about the fact that the government failed to cost the 2014 reforms adequately.
So actually, this should not be a surprise. Local authorities are increasingly overspending their budgets for supporting pupils with high needs,
more boring special schools and in non-maintained special specialist probation, so the money comes from central government.
For those kids that have a formal recognition? And if you spend more than you actually get as a local authority,
then actually you have to find other budgets for supporting those kids because you have a legal obligation to meet them.
Most local authorities have transferred money from their schools block to their high needs block.
They're for reducing money available for mainstream.
So if you like mainstream, is paying for the rise in pupil numbers rather than more money being pulled down centrally and more damning.
Still, the department has limited assurance about the quality of support for pupils with SIMD in mainstream
schools and no way of explaining the local variation on the inconsistency of support across the country.
So one account for the mess we're in in terms of day and exclusion.
From the National Audit Office, point of view is about resources.
And this is supported by surveys of her teachers in school that one of the prime press
shows that key pressure for 28 percent is the additional needs of some children,
i.e. the cost of additional needs of some children. Schools have to find that money to meet their needs,
and the response has been to reduce the hours or numbers of teaching assistants to balance the budget.
So the explanation about it? Exclusion is to do in a way with a lack of teaching assistance.
According to the National Audit Office. In fact, as we've seen elsewhere in the exclusion literature,
what happens is that this kind of perverse incentives operating in the way that the funding happens.
What you get is under identification of some needs.
Yes, because schools are incentivised to not identify children who are crying such
additional support if they actually don't have the money to provide to cater for them.
Yeah. So if unless actually. Children need more than £6000 unlikely to be able to identify their needs if they haven't got the money to provide them.
But at the same time, the statement saying the CPP process has led to an overall identification of needs because what is viewed as a golden ticket,
if you haven't got enough resources and actually you need to put your children down that route in order to access the resources.
And there's been a 50 percent increase in demand for local authorities to carry out UHC needs assessment.
So that puts additional pressures on the system because it is a heavily bureaucratic process, so which falls in mainstream on same course.
So what you get is Sancho's being tied up in a bureaucratic process of identification of needs rather
than the process of supporting teachers in classrooms to meet Jordan with additional needs support.
I'm not going to spend too long on this because I think. Lucinda did a great job on it, and she'll be up there on iPod.
So that's in relation to ASEAN. Yeah. So those children who also fall under the label of having a disability.
Should be safeguarded by the Equality Act. Yes. So where's the other children of safeguarded by the Children's and Families Act?
Those children should have an additional or separate safeguard, which is about litigation.
Yes. So they should be protected. By the Equality Act, but the justice report, which Lucinda in Dimensions, says that one of the difficulties is that.
People can easily interpret the the Equality Act about treating every child the same way as,
in actual fact, what they should be doing is making reasonable adjustments.
So as my quote done here puts.
Requires schools to make reasonable adjustments to policies and practises that may put disabled pupils at a disadvantage.
So this could involve. Applying disciplinary sanctions differently to disabled pupils in order to avoid putting that at a substantial disadvantage.
And that's particularly problematic for schools that have a zero tolerance process.
Because the expectation is actually, you know, one.
One, misbehaviour and you're out, it doesn't repeat itself, actually lead to the accommodation of behaviours,
and the justice report also talks about headteachers kind of feeling quite constrained in terms of making,
making, treating some pupils differently to other pupils.
That fact being flattered by the situation.
And, of course, the the tribunal system that's designed to protect those children is actually incredibly cumbersome.
I did a review on how many people actually use the tribunal system.
Lots of people, lots of parents of children with special educational needs who will bring claims that relate to admissions.
But very few parents bring claims when it comes to unfair, unreasonable, discriminatory treatment.
And those parents do. It's how it has a very low success rate.
If you look up the statistics, I think something like one hundred and thirty eight parents brought a claim.
And there's not much data in terms of what they were, what the unfair treatment was, but the exclusions form at least a significant part of it.
But very few of those ones that are presented are actually upheld at the end of the day.
And part of that difficulty is the kinds of information that parents have to provide
to a court about being treated unfairly about the school's behaviour policy.
Actually, it's quite difficult for them to get access to it.
And also, of course, a very stressful situation.
So the system is is heavily underutilised, and in that sense, it's kind of not fit for purpose, for safeguarding those kids.
How am I doing for time? Yeah, just very briefly to put up the The Timpson review.
It actually doesn't talk about SIMD very much or did a kind of word search on it,
and I think this 36 references out of can't remember how many pages to send.
But what it does do is talk about the fact that what we tend to have is kind of separate bits of guidance,
you know, ones that deal with exclusion, some that deals with SGMD.
And actually, it needs to be clear and accessible, and they need to be looked at together to make sure that they're actually consistent.
What I was pleased about, though, when I looked at it,
is that what it does do in a way that the pure CND stuff publications don't is actually talk about children with ASEAN support needs.
I'm talking about writing about the importance of schools working towards removing the barriers to education,
and so very much about kind of thinking at schools level in terms of removing barriers rather
than this kind of bureaucratic process of wheeling people through the identification system.
OK. So. That's kind of looking at the kind of the landscape, but a kind of macro level.
We've done a series of studies looking at kind of school level,
and I put up the first one really because it it provided a window onto kind of how we moved on to thinking about what was going on.
We were invited way back to help schools develop materials to enable them to identify their disabled children.
And part of that process was about looking at how children viewed the children's own voice about how
they viewed what was helpful in school and what constituted barriers to participation in school.
So this went out. It didn't pick up particular disabled kids.
It went out across the board, particular age groups and schools who chose the online questionnaire.
They were twenty five of them. There was something like 1600 pupils that filled it in.
And two things struck us about the findings.
One about the fact that when you looked across disabled and non-disabled children,
actually the sorts of things they mentioned in terms of barriers and supports were very similar.
It's not as if actually the disabled children were some very, very different discrete group they were.
There was a similarity between them.
But if you looked at the ratings, what was clear is that forgive and forget and barriers, children experienced more of an impact of them.
Yes. So whereas the non-disabled kids would say that things weren't OK, for example, the disabled children would say they were bad or very bad.
So they were experienced more acutely.
And the sorts of things that came up when they rated different times and places about finding difficult was getting on with classmates,
joining in school activities, lessons moving around and during school events.
So they were kind of part and parcel that was highlighted. And the support which I didn't put up there.
So those are things that were difficult. When asked a question about what they found helpful.
They talked about people in particular.
Interestingly, they talked about friends, the importance of friends, helping them through difficult times,
and it kind of foregrounded for us the importance of thinking about the school environment in terms of
relationships and the link that has between actually being an environment where you're where you're learning,
where you're progressing and an environment in which you feel you belong. Yeah.
And if you don't feel that you belong, actually you're learning is is much more limited as indeed we would all feel.
I look back on this. I kind of think, Oh, we should have predicted a lot, but we didn't at the time.
And my last slide more recently, what we've been looking at is still looking at barriers in support and looking at them for all children,
but also putting into that picture how connected children feel to school.
So the extent to which children feel that they belong in school and looking at the relationship between them.
And this is a kind of very brief snapshot from our.
From our findings. It what I put up, there are kind of things that offer all kids, particularly that.
In the four schools that we looked across, I think they were almost 600 kids that we asked about this and actually moving around the school
was problematic and three out of the four schools that we kindly took part in our survey.
And actually, when you looked at the the school estate. For many schools, it was a very crowded environment and the impact on that.
You know, I suspect the people in their everyday kind of blocky sound.
But if you're constantly jostling down corridors, that actually leads to poor relationships between kids who kind of push and shove.
And then, of course, you know, if that's happening outside the lesson, then it carries on into the lesson.
But it also impacted on things that help pupils feel part of what's happening.
So being with their friends and having time on their own,
the children wrote about finding it difficult and understanding lessons of lessons going too fast and wanting better explanations.
And this links with something that Harry mentioned in a previous session about children feeling safe and the importance of friends.
If you don't feel safe and lessens the importance of friends and being with
friends or being near friends in terms of helping you in that circumstance,
I'm just looked at the time I was passed over to Ruth and I,
a Passover just living a quote here from Roger Sleigh just about we can get seduced by, by statistics, large numbers.
But what we should all be thinking about is that these intensely individual and personal experiences?
OK. Hello, everybody. So what I'm going to talk through for the rest of the session is looking at absence as a form of exclusion.
So I'll be talking about absent voices who are the participants within my study,
the methods that I chose to try and empower these particular individuals,
reframing their narrative of why they're not in school and and then round you up
at the end with a summary and hopefully some questions for you to take away.
OK, so my research is around why a growing number of autistic adolescent girls are stopping attending mainstream secondary schools.
And and this came about really with a conversation with an educational psychologist who kind of gave me this information
and and really the research was a question about how do we how do we find out why they're they're stopping attending?
We know that these girls have been historically absent from our understanding of autism and from stories of exclusion.
If we think about autism, most people stereotypically think of a male person, a boy, Sheldon Cooper.
Maybe until very recently, we didn't know that girls could be autistic.
In fact, there are many, many autistic girls. I have an autistic daughter.
And when we think about exclusion, we tend to think more about boys being excluded than about girls necessarily being excluded to the same extent.
So, so I want to talk about absence itself as a form of exclusion about children
and young people not being in school because they are excluded in some way.
So perhaps through absenteeism, are they are they not in school because actually they're too anxious to attend?
So they have an authorised absence because they're ill, but actually they're not ill,
that it's anxiety all they actually absent because they they can't be in the classroom
because it's too difficult for them to perhaps manage the sensory environment.
Or are they absent from the playground because they're too worried that they're going to be abused or
bullied in some way or they're not in the dining hall because that's when people are always mean to them.
Well, they actually in the classroom, but they're not engaged with any learning.
Or are they discouraged from attending a particular lesson because they're not particularly good at it or because they need more support during it?
And for those children who actually stop pretending to be home educated,
is that because they've chosen to be home educated or because they feel that that's an preferable option,
even though they'd rather be in school learning? So how do we how do we find out?
Well, the way that I wanted to find out was was actually by valuing the lived experience of the individual,
by actually going to the young people and asking them for their personal experiences.
And this is a quote from John A. Williams, who is an autistic woman,
and she was talking about how important it is to to judge things or to understand things from the inside rather than judging it from the outside.
And although this is obviously relevant to autistic young people, I think it's also relevant for for anybody as an individual.
How do we know how each of us feel until we ask them personally?
So it was important to me to to actually start gathering narratives, and I thought that would be the way forward.
And what I was hoping to do. I've got my my laptop open here so I can look at the notes.
Of course, I'm not looking to do anything. I just going to close it now just in case.
So I wanted really to to kind of provoke a broader conceptualisation of exclusion that would include absence as our part of our understanding.
I wanted to eliminate some of the contributing factors to the absence of these young people that were of value to them,
rather than maybe to the school staff or to the parents or to policymakers.
And I wanted to propose some recommendations for practise based on their own
personal experience and their knowledge of what helps and what doesn't help,
because it's all too easy to make assumptions,
isn't it about what we should be doing to help without actually working out if that's the right thing to do?
So the message that I chose where the chief, first of all, I wanted to use a participatory framework,
so I wanted the the people with the young people within my study to be very much involved in feeling
that they were they were part of the research rather than me doing the research to them as such.
So I had an advisory group of three adolescent autistic females who worked with me on working out what the research should look like,
what the question should look like, you know, right down to the sort of email I should be sending and the information I should be providing
and the sorts of ways I could interview these young people that might work for them.
And then the participants within the study were very much collaborators and co-producers of knowledge, as you'll see as we go through.
The methods I chose, I had two different methods. One was looking at personal constructs, psychology, looking at the girls,
understanding their personal construct of the ideal school and what could be learnt from that.
And the other was looking at their own life history narratives about their experiences of school, what worked and what didn't work.
Within my research, I actually had 10 participants that began the research.
They all had a clinical diagnosis of autism, some with co-occurring conditions as well, all aged between 11 and 16.
When they began the research with me, no diagnosed learning difficulties.
In fact, they all define themselves as academically able. Female at birth.
And that's relevant because what are the participants with my study?
Although the rest identified us as female, this particular participant who we'll hear more from in a moment.
They define themselves as gender fluid, so I'll be using the pronouns they and them for them.
And all of the participants began mainstream secondary school, but had stopped attending at some point.
So the idea of a school exercise, basically, I had nine different categories that I wanted to ask them about.
So first of all, started to asking What can you tell me about the sort of school you would not like to attend?
And then right now, tell me about the sort of school we would like to attend.
It's based on a model that's been used. Moran used the personal self construct of the self.
And then there's also been the ideal school construct, which I basically amended.
I'm just trying to think find the slide. So Williams and Hank in 2007 first came up with the ideal school approach.
Both of these options, the school, you don't want to go to the school, you do want to go to where supposedly of an imaginary school.
And this is my first interview with participants and this is the results of of Robin.
Now, once I'd finished the ideal school, I asked participants to do some diamond ranking for me and just pick out,
say, the nine top factors for them in their ideal school.
So for Robin, these are the things that came out and we've categorised them sorry back.
Categorise them by colour for you. So at the top, you can see for her, the most important thing was the choice of a life.
So she wanted to be able to work through her school work, but she also wanted free time,
and she also wanted to be happy to be independent and to be herself.
And she wanted her peers to be mature and respectful.
You can see there's also information there about the sort of teacher, and they wanted flexibility.
She wanted to be able to enjoy her lessons. The sort of classroom she wanted was quite important.
You can see actually she left mainstream and ultimately she ended up working through an online provider which provided her with her ideal classroom.
Actually, because it was her bedroom and she could make it,
she could actually control her complete environment, and for her, that was really important.
And she can fidget without disrupting others, which makes me think that that was possibly drawn from her own experience.
The second thing that we did was we started looking at personal narratives using a charge like this.
Basically, I sent out to each of the participants before Interview asked them on this
to add on any positive and negative memories of their experiences of school.
Very much what they could remember. And then they sent it back to me, and I devised interview questions around their personal charge.
So this is Alex. It's deliberately blurring, so you can't read, watch what they've written.
And I'm just going to read through some of the things around here so that you can get a feel for it.
What if the first thing is supposed to be quite interesting is that you can see for them and indeed for most of the other participants in my story,
study attendance at school was full of positive and negative experiences.
And that's really important because we can learn from the positive as much from the negative.
So if we look down. So basically, they're lying horizontal line going across is looking at chronology.
And then the higher up above the neutral line have this red line, the better the experience from the lower down that, the more negative experience.
So one of the things we did when we finish talking about all those different experiences was
I asked each of the individuals to pick out some events and tell me why they didn't work,
what was wrong, how else could they have been better supported and same for the top?
Now, Jill mentioned earlier on about peace and possibly getting any actually paid in order to secure funding,
secure support this particular participant. I think this is where she got.
He got a fake story. They got their ship at that point in there.
And one of the things that came out of my study is maybe if she if they had better support earlier on,
we might have been able to avoid everything that came after. So some of the negative events were.
She got they got frustrated because they weren't able to communicate.
A best friend left the school, this is one of the ones down here, and again, possibly she had a teacher who disliked me being inquisitive.
That was one of the lowest marks on the life charts.
And that actually came out quite a lot with the participants that they had a teachers who wouldn't ask wouldn't
allow them to ask questions or limited them to two questions per lesson because they ask too many questions.
This sort of thing happened quite early on. Charles mentioned belonging and this one over here.
This is around didn't feel part of a group didn't feel like I belonged. And up here, she tried.
She joined the netball team to try and fit in, but that was really just a way of trying to cope.
I can. Part of this one here is being bullied at school and and the final one at the end there is they lost the library libraries, a safe place.
A lot of the participants talked about having a safe place to go to, either between lessons or either over lunch, for example.
A lot of them gravitated to the library and a lot of them lost that space. They were told they weren't allowed to go there.
And this particular participant ended up spending break time sat outside the next lesson,
which is in that last black circle at the end, the all opportunities there.
If somebody had asked what was going on for possibly specific action and support to be put in place,
oh sorry, I just want to talk about the stars as well. So, so the good things are up here.
We've got things like the first stories where she was taken out into a small group
and the teacher enabled them to ask as many questions as they wanted to their life.
To be curious, they were like being positive. They were working at the right level for them academically and at the right pace.
It's also, as I say, a small group and that was also helpful. A lot of the negative impacts were were deteriorating mental health.
A lot of the positive ones were being referred for support and then that not working and her dipping down again.
And the second star was when they actually left mainstream.
So all of this has gone on in between.
OK, so one of the things I want to talk about was the importance for the individual of choosing the right strategy.
I'm guessing you've all heard of exit cards or time out passes, that sort of thing.
It seems to be a go to strategy, particularly for autistic young people, for some reason.
And these are some of the comments from the young people in my study about the exit paths that they were given when they were not able to cope.
And the same participants before, Alex. So basically feeling that they couldn't use it.
Daisy felt it was quite useful. Leaving two minutes late, arriving two minutes earlier for her, that would have helped.
Erin would never have used it because she didn't want to stand out.
And Jane didn't want to use it, took her that she eventually did gigs, it took a long time to use it.
When I have a few problems with with the use of the time out card in itself, it clearly works for some people, not genuine for many.
And and the reason I have a problem with it is because it doesn't actually
address the reason the child needs to leave the classroom in the first place.
And that's where I would like the learning to go and be actually asking those questions.
If the young person a lot of a lot of the girls were put on part-time timetables.
My own daughter has been put on a part-time timetable before and that the the
words that come back from schools who I'm sure are trying to be supportive are,
you know, as soon as they feel able to come back into class, they can.
And what that does is locate the problem within the child and says as soon as the child can fix herself, she can come back in.
Whereas actually, what I'd like to see is schools and individual teachers thinking, OK, so they've obviously left the classroom for a reason.
What is that reason? How can we fix that so that they can then return and be involved included in those lessons?
OK, so what have we learnt? Well, it's reframe the narrative a little bit about these why these girls are out of scope.
As expected, they all said the school environment was really important to them.
A lot of them were experiencing sensory overload. Joe mentioned the crowded environment.
That's certainly a problem as well. However, when we looked at the personal construct exercise and they started to rank their responses,
most participants said it was the ethos of the school that was most important and the attitudes
and understanding of the adults that were more important than the actual environment.
And the reason for that is nicely defined by Rosie, who says they don't know why they do things US teachers and agree with the reasons behind it.
They just won't do it. I did a piece of research before this where I went to primary schools and talked to teachers and
Sancho's and the young people themselves and parents and teachers were saying things to me like,
Oh yeah, she's she's got a wobble cushion, but she doesn't need it.
We've kept it in the in the cupboard all year, and it's that kind of the teacher didn't really agree with it.
Therefore, it wasn't happening.
OK, so I just want to show you quickly the sort of responses we got from this sort of school that you wouldn't want to attend.
Anybody want to hazard a guess for what sort of things they thought the school would care most about the sort of school they wouldn't want to attend?
Anybody went to me. Uniform? Yeah, possibly.
Anybody else want to have a guess? Another language. Exam results.
OK, so look. Yes, that's that's the one that overwhelmingly came out, it was schools that prioritise good grades,
which is interesting because these girls were all highly academic. They all wanted to go to university.
Rewards, what does the school reward conforming?
Just getting good grades.
Not actually doing anything as long as you do what everybody else wants and that that's part of the problem when you are these,
these girls obviously all had a neurological difference they didn't fit.
And that's part of the problem. In a school that values conformity, they're always going to struggle outcomes.
You're all the same. OK, so this sort of school we would like to attend.
What do you think they care about the most? Well-Being. Yeah, absolutely.
Mental health. Achieving the impossible, being happy, having free time friends, definitely relationships come in there as well.
Absolutely. They went to the school that would reward them for being helpful, kind of working hard.
Daisy mentions perseverance, and I think that's so much more valuable than the word resilience.
You know, so often these girls were told to be more resilient,
but they weren't actually offered any support or any any way of things changing in school unless it came from them.
And that's very hard, isn't it, to be resilient, told to be resilient for things that really perhaps you shouldn't have to be resilient for?
And the outcomes they wanted go and achieve their dreams, be happy, feel safe and again,
in line with what Joe was talking about, safety is really important and most of these girls did not feel safe.
This is Rosie. This is Aaron, I do apologise for my behaviour at school was perfect.
And this really brings in that, you know, it's difficult with a teacher by observation to necessarily know whether a child is struggling.
That's why, again, it's important to speak to the individual.
You wouldn't have been able to tell by looking at area that necessarily that she was struggling so much.
But she wanted to be in school, in fact, all these girls would have preferred to be in school learning had the environment been suitable for her.
OK, so summary, the individual perspectives of the autistic girls absent from school have a lot of consistencies,
with the findings of young people excluded formerly from schools, things like relationships belonging for girls who are absent from school.
There was also a potential link between deterioration, significant deterioration of mental health that combined with the loss of education.
So they were kind of put in the position of I have to stop going to school because my mental health can't take it anymore.
They rejected the environment and the ethos of the school they were in, but they did want to be learning,
and people like Robin were very definitely challenging the purpose of school and the structures of school.
So what can we do? Focus on people well-being, very important.
Ask, don't assume, because if we don't ask, we won't know and support not threatened.
They've all said, don't send me a letter threatening me or my attendance.
That's not helpful. And don't take away questions.
Why is a child absent from school? Are we asking the right questions?
Are we asking the right people and I would argue that unless you're asking the young people,
you're not and how it answers on absence and exclusion differ if you gathered people voice and compared it with a teacher evaluation of need.
What is the impact? Who is the impact upon? Are we just thinking of the other children in the class?
Very important. Are we thinking about the impact on the teacher? But are we also thinking about the impact on that young person?
How does that affect the provision of support and who decides what the support should be given and when?
And this, of course, to take away thank you.