This week is World Autism Awareness Week, established by the UK National Autistic Society (NAS) celebrating the International people living with, and supporting people living with, autism. Through raising awareness of the condition we can promote and embrace the unique talents of those with autism. The aim is to make the world a friendlier place for all our community affected by it.
Did you know that autistic children are three times more likely to be excluded from mainstream school. Autism affects around one in 100 people. The imperative for educating ourselves, to gain awareness of strategies to support our learners is evident and crucial. Autistic people may face different challenges within communication and interaction, information processing, and sensory processing with every individual affected differently.
‘If you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism’
Dr Steven Shore
The culmination of the week is World Autism Awareness Day (WAAD) on Friday 2nd April, an opportunity to highlight the hurdles that people with autism and others living with autism face daily. By increasing our world knowledge of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) through increasing exposure and understanding, WAAD is, more importantly, a celebration of the skills and focus they deserve.
“Autism is ‘a lifelong, developmental disability that affects how a person communicates with and relates to other people, and how they experience the world around them.”
National Autistic Society
Communication and interaction challenges may affect how a person with autism interprets body language, facial expressions, eye contact, humour, and sarcasm. It also affects how to start, maintain or finish conversations. Information processing and social understanding for the autistic may lead to struggles with how they transfer understanding or learning. It may impact how to use unstructured time, predict outcomes, adapt to change, and require more time to process the information given to them. We can support by understanding a child’s routine and sticking to it as much as possible. Using fewer words, less to process; will support verbal understanding, and for learners who have trouble processing verbal directions, visual aids and step-by-step guides are helpful.
People who are autistic often become confused and misinterpret the social understanding of situations. They may have trouble reading and understanding social contexts, social cues and others thoughts and intentions, emotions or friendships. Some of the most common individualisms of autistic people focus on their Sensory Processing. They may experience over or under sensitivity to touch, taste, smells, sounds, light, dark, colours, heat or cold or pain. Whilst neurotypical people can block out or ignore distractions these can cause significant anxiety for the autistic. It is important for teachers to remember that children on the autism spectrum are unique, and what defines one may not define another. By raising awareness of sensitivity issues and how situations and environments can be overwhelming for the autistic, we can make simple sympathetic adjustments to environments. We will be supporting raising awareness of autism by offering our Awareness of Understanding Autism and Awareness of Autism Friendly Classrooms free for April. Find out more here.
Famous autistic people include Greta Thunberg, Anthony Hopkins, and historical figures thought to be autistic include Mozart, Einstein and Thomas Jefferson. Adopting a person centred approach to support our learners with autism is key, alongside educating their peers to celebrate their uniqueness, individualism and “superpowers”.
Written by Georgie McIntyre, Director of Learning and Development