What is the story behind Barriers to Education?

The project was initiated by Spectrum Gaming, a community for autistic young people.

There is a growing evidence base to indicate autistic children experience barriers to education at a significantly earlier age, and their experience of it is more long lasting (termed School Distress in the study; Connelly et al., 2023 – 92% of 947 parents/carers survey said their child was neurodivergent).

Spectrum Gaming supports over 1,700 autistic young people, the majority of whom experience Barriers to Education:

Through building trusting relationships with the young people at Spectrum Gaming, we heard continual messages that directly opposed commonly used guidance for promoting school attendance.

“The school environment was not working for my child. This cannot be overcome with small steps or graded exposure.”

“My junior school said I was definitely not autistic and I was fine in school once I had been dragged in crying.. I wasn’t fine at all, I was breaking inside all the time. I got diagnosed autistic aged 13 by then I had suffered a lot of unnecessary trauma and developed extreme anxiety, [now] I struggle to go to school at all.”

“The focus should be on my child’s welfare first before focusing on a return to school.”

As a result, Spectrum Gaming developed a partnership with the ‘North West Emotionally Based School Avoidance Interest Group’. As school absenteeism became a top priority for the Department of Education, interest from wider stakeholders grew, and resulted in a nationwide, multi-disciplinary research and project team being formed.

This guidance is led by a steering group with representatives from Local Authorities, Health services, the Third Sector and Parent Carer Forums.

The steering group has worked collaboratively with:

Over 400 stakeholders actively contributing to the work
Over 1,500 people giving feedback on the guidance

Feedback

We hosted a series of webinars outlining our project aims in 2024 during which we gained the views of attendees (a range of professionals and parents) via Menti meter questions. As a part of this consultation we asked attendees to rate the current guidance in their area and then to rate our guidance plans in comparison. The responses are shown below:

Here are the three webinars we created in advance of the Barriers to Education launch

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