21 May 2024
In this episode Professor Sally Robinson, Professor of Disability and Community Inclusion and Professor Gerry Redmond, Professor of Public Policy unpack the crucial topic of supporting the safety and wellbeing of autistic and neurodivergent children in our schools and preschools.
Show Notes
Transcript
Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And today I'm joined by a couple of academics from Flinders University, Professor Sally Robinson, Professor of Disability and Community Inclusion, and Professor Gerry Redmond, Professor of Public Policy. Thank you very much for joining us.
Sally Robinson: Thanks for having us.
Gerry Redmond: Great to be here.
Dale Atkinson: So tonight we're at the Student Wellbeing Leader conference, where you are both, keynote speakers, and we're talking about supporting the safety and wellbeing of autistic and neurodivergent students. Can you tell us a little bit, first of all, how do we define neurodiversity?
Gerry Redmond: Look, neurodiversity is relatively recent term, and it's not yet a clinical term. So it's used as a means of people to identify themselves in terms of having diverse, needs, supports and also talents to what's seen as general in the population. [00:01:00]
And in practice, neurodiversity tends to cover, people, for example, who are autistic or who have ADHD or perhaps dyslexia or a whole range of different conditions that are fairly common, particularly in school going populations.
Dale Atkinson: And what are the, what does the research tell us about the proportion or the number of neurodiverse students in our schools?
Gerry Redmond: We don't know exactly. This is really interesting. We know it's high. We know it's increasing, but it's very difficult to give an exact number. What we do know is that about 1 in 5 students in our school system does have some kind of support for learning that's associated with disability. [00:02:00]
For example a very high proportion of those, by far the majority would fit into one of these neurodiverse, categories such as ADHD or autism or dyslexia.
Dale Atkinson: Is the prevalence increasing, or is it just that we're becoming better at understanding some of the issues?
Gerry Redmond: Again, we don't know. It could be both. It's certainly the case that we're becoming better at understanding these issues. It's also the case that we're changing and developing our views as to how these issues should be defined.
So it's really that we're looking at a moving picture here. And I would expect that over the next several years we will see an increase simply because we know there are some groups where these conditions are not diagnosed the extent that you would expect. But we don't know where it's going to end up.
Dale Atkinson: So Sally, what does the research tell us about, how learning is different for this group of students? [00:03:00]
Sally Robinson: Well, the research that we did was seeking the perspectives of students and educators and parents about what helps students to feel safe and supported at school. So we weren't really looking at learning.
We were looking at social and emotional well-being and safety. We were particularly interested in a ‘what works’ approach, rather than looking at really dwelling in the negative experience that students have at school. There's not very much that's known about either of those things, the ‘what work’s or the ‘what doesn't work’ from the perspective of autistic students, though. So when we came into this research, we were surprised to find out how little was known from a research perspective, from students own point of view. And so it's been a very interesting research project for us to really focus on prioritizing students points of view about what helps to support their learning.
Dale Atkinson: And what did you hear about what can help support their learning?
Sally Robinson: Well, we really [00:04:00] came up with four key areas that we focused on The relationships that are really core for students in supporting trust and a sense of confidence. The practices and programs that help to scaffold those relationships, a continuity in the support for students, and the continuity that supports the practices and programs and the systems level things that can support change.
Dale Atkinson: I think one of the things, particularly for the audience and our listeners, is largely a group of educators and teachers is what does the research tell us about, that relationship between autistic students and their experience in their relationship with teachers?
Sally Robinson: Well, like all students, relationships are primary. That's a very human thing for everybody, isn't it? But there were lots of barriers for students about forming trusting relationships. And I want to really emphasize that the barriers [00:05:00] weren't with the students themselves, so much as they were with, relationships between students and people who they could have reliable, trustworthy, consistent relationships with.
So, for example, students told us about things that they would have set up with, teachers that they knew well. So strategies that they would use when they got overwhelmed or they really needed some time out of a busy classroom for a few minutes to help decompress when they were getting a real sense of sensory overwhelm.
And then, they would have a relief teacher who wouldn't uphold the strategies that the students were using really successfully. Or they would have a go to person who really understood what was going on for a student when they were feeling really overwhelmed and they were starting to melt down. Somebody who could help talk that person down and to feel successfully able to continue on with their learning if their go to person was away, they didn't have other trusted relationships with somebody. [00:06:00]
So that the sort of, you know, consistency of relationships and having relationships with more than one person, was lacking. For some students, for lots of students, actually, there was some fragility in relationships with peers and so difficulty with friendships and navigating friendships and sometimes the culture of the school environment wasn't robust in really supporting students to feel that they were valued and that they really belonged and that they were people who were an important part of the school, and that made it difficult for them.
Every student has a hard time in school sometimes, but when you don't feel a really strong sense of belonging in your school and like you're an important part of the school, it's much harder for you to re-enter into the school community again.
Dale Atkinson: So what are the changes in practice and approach that schools should be considering in this space?
Sally Robinson: So in terms of relationships, students and families both really wanted to see stronger, proactive, visible responses to bullying and interpersonal harm as well. [00:07:00] So that it was really evident, that teachers, school leaders, and other support staff in schools responded when anybody experienced interpersonal harm. Because if you can see anybody who is experiencing harm receives a strong response, an effective response, an empathic response, then you feel confident that somebody is going to respond if that happens to you.
Feeling part of the community of learners so that there are diverse learning strategies, for everybody. And I realise that these are things that are resource intensive. They take time, they take skill. So it's easy for me to say it – It takes a lot to implement it. Building acceptance, building welcoming building a sense of value across the school community for diversity.
And that, you know, schools are places for lots of different people and the kind of practices that build trust, you know, the ways that that teachers, proactively demonstrate that they are trustworthy people. That they respect students, that they value students when there's a vacuum and students can't see, especially if they find it a bit hard to navigate social relationships. [00:08:00]
If teachers don't show and say and tell that they value and respect people, sometimes you can fill that void with thinking that people don't value and respect you. So it's really important to show and tell that you that you do.
Dale Atkinson: That sounds very relatable. Gerry, in terms of system responses, what should we be considering as an education system and as groups of schools and preschools?
Gerry Redmond: That is a really difficult question. Okay. To start with, I think you need to recognise that schools are part of communities, and what happens outside schools also impacts what happens inside schools. So if you're thinking about systemic responses, you need to be thinking about how we as a society, support and help develop young people with a whole range [00:09:00] of different, needs and disabilities.
So for schools it's about recognition. It's about providing the adequate resources. It's about, linking up with other services. One of the things that came out from our research was often a lack of coordination with other, for example, health service or disability services outside of the school. So, it's a really tricky thing. At the very basics it’s about developing positive relationships, teachers and students developing positive relationships, students developing positive relationships with each other, whatever the characteristics.
But that it is a lot more likely to take place in a situation where it's this broad systemic change and where schools are more welcoming, but also society is more accepting and welcoming and perhaps less unequal than what we often experience today in Australia. You know, that is a very significant challenge [00:10:00] for all of us.
Dale Atkinson: What are the experiences in your research? What have you seen? Is there anything that has jumped out that's really, kind of, impressed you in terms of the way that a school or teacher has approached this?
Sally Robinson: Some of the strategies that we saw from educators were really lovely, creative, thoughtful strategies that didn't require resourcing, but had really good impacts. And students and families and teachers all talked about them as effective. So an example of that was a teacher who had a practice of morning and afternoon check-ins with her class and they were just a really nice way of taking the temperature, the emotional temperature for her group. And they didn't single anybody out. Everybody was part of that.
It only took a few minutes – morning and afternoon – but it was a way for her to check in with anybody who needed a little bit more support about whether their emotional regulation was a little bit out, whether their sensory issues were a bit out of kilter, [00:11:00] whether she needed to have a little bit of extra communication with home that afternoon about the fact that the day hadn't gone so well for that student, and so at home, they needed to provide a little bit more support.
It was just a really nice, responsive strategy that didn't call out anybody for being autistic or not autistic or neurodivergent or not neurodivergent. So there was, there were quite a few strategies like that which were really thoughtful.
Dale Atkinson: Just a kind of, present mindful consciousness and being very thoughtful. I'm going to give you both a magic wand and give you the opportunity to wave it at one specific area. Is there one thing - Gerry, you first – that you would do if you had control of the education system that you would change?
Gerry Redmond: Oh, I'd like to have control of the entire country!
Dale Atkinson: I'll give you that.
Gerry Redmond: Look, I think it's really important that schools are adequately resourced to support students with a whole range of diverse needs. I think that is absolutely critical. [00:12:00] It's also critical, however, that families are supported as well in raising their children because as all the education documents tells us, children's education is, if you like, a co-production between families and schools.
Dale Atkinson: Very good. Now, if you could hand your magic wand over to Sally, what would you do?
Sally Robinson: I'm going to use my wish to make sure that children's priorities and their concerns are heard at all levels of the education system. When we talk to kids in our research, they said a whole lot of stuff in their groups that you'd expect about being full of bravado. And they would do this and they'd respond to that and they would challenge the bullies in this way, and they would, you know, do all of this sort of brave stuff.
And then when we found other ways of helping them express their views more privately, more quietly through worksheets and other ways of talking, they shared a whole lot of more private, quiet concerns and worries and fears, really sad things about feeling lonely [00:13:00] and feeling worried and feeling frightened, and those things really matter. They really, really matter about, you know, if kids are really terrified of going to high school because the bullying might get worse, but the bullying is already bad, we actually really need to know that, and we really need to be responding to that.
It's not okay that kids are feeling like that, but they're covering it up with a whole lot of bravado about “I'd make a sword and I'd whack them”. So to find the layers, through the way that kids talk, to find out what's really worrying them so that we can really respond to it and do something about it.
That's what I do with my magic wand.
Dale Atkinson: Both excellent, very challenging things in a very, informative and challenging conversation for our educators to address. So thank you very much for your time. Sally, Jerry, thank you.
Sally Robinson: Thank you.
Gerry Redmond: Thank you.
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