Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi,
I am a student journalist at Nottingham Trent University. For my final year dissertation, I am doing a study and feature on autism and whether mainstream education caters for people on the spectrum.
I have two cousins with forms of autism so the subject is very close to my heart and something I feel does not get the coverage and exposure it should.
While I know there are many successful autism-only schools up and down the country, I am also aware of instances where mainstream schools have been unable to provide the children with the education they require.
Just wondering whether anybody on here has any stories of where their children have struggled at a regular school and why it was the case. Are teachers trained to deal with people on the spectrum or is it more the child struggles?
It would be of great help to me, if anybody that had suffered seriously with this subject in mind would chat with me briefly about their experience with mainstream education, or even on a lighter note a success story r.e. an autism-only school.
I look forward to speaking to some of you.
Cheers.
Matt Ball
I can understand you are trrying to be informed, Matt, but people may feel they want to be helpful and disclose confidences, and you really cannot give such guarantees at undergraduate level.
Even if no names are given, what people might say to you could still identify them or services they have accessed. If you were a postgraduate you would have to present your research to an ethics committee, and you would have to demonstrate that you had followed procedures, including consent forms and assurances about disposal of data. It is well nigh impossible to do that at undergraduate level.
My big concern though is with your university. It is the one that most often crops up on here with undergraduates requesting research support. Most universities ban this behaviour. We mostly have three institutions that allow this, yours being the one most often doing it.
All the other universities in the UK do not do this.
Also what you are doing in a dissertation is demonstrating that you understand good research practice. What you are doing here is not good research practice. You cannot be certain that the people responding are genuine, whereas if you set up your sources properly you could demonstrate that all the respondents were bona fide.