AIBU to ask you which businesses are the least Autism friendly?

[LarrytheCucumber]

I nominate NatWest for their new look complete with confusing banks of cash machines and loud music. (Also bad for hearing aid wearers).

It's their special interest (drama/singing for ds & ballet/dance/musical theatre for dd)

They feel like they belong in that environment. I can't explain it. Dd is training to be a professional dancer & has been in many shows both amateur & child professional. The noise, lights, etc etc for some reason does not trigger a meltdown both as an audience member or a performer.

It probably should but it doesn't.

But I recognise that it is a problem for many on the spectrum which is why I applaud the efforts of Odeon Cinema & certain theatres for having relaxed/autism friendly showings.

Wanderer that is so true about the plain ham sandwich. I must have had the conversation a million times

Took dd to a dance event recently. Subway there didn't want to sell dh the chicken no butter no mayo no salad just dry bread & meat bAguette.

And don't get me onto unexpected dressings on salad.

DS likes plain noodles from the Chinese takeaway. So we order plain noodles along with the other things. Unfortunately plain noodles come with vegetables. So we ask for plain noodles, no vegetables, just noodles. The order comes and quite often we have plain noodles, with vegetables! We have got to the point where we open the order in the shop just to check because so often one of us has had to go back and explain.
To be fair the woman at the counter always gets them replaced, but it is a pain.

Didn't have my autistic son with me the other day but went in a church in a certain tourist trap... where they were playing piped music. Non stop. He'd have hated that.

Any shops with music are not autism-friendly, I think. I guess there was a half arsed study in the 1950s that claimed people spend more when they play music in shops. But it's not true. We get out of places faster if there's music.

The classroom/halls walls thing is Ofsted, surely?

Every fucking half term and holiday we are ordered to produce a big, bright project for them to "display"

Every ofsted report seems to comment on the displays of children's work being a good thing.

Give me my holiday back (I can't take term time, why can you take my holiday?) and give everybody a nice serene environment. Everybody wins.

Tatty so true!

Even the tidiest classroom feels like overload when every inch of space is covered. Add thirty children and its a wonder any of them can concentrate at all.

Teachers should be able to do what they like with their walls. If I want a framed print of Stubbs' horses in there day in, day out, then I should be able to have it. Maybe Turner on the other side and a Klee at the back. Unchanging, interesting and probably remembered by pupils for a lot longer than a bunch of laminated mathematical symbols and exhortations to keep trying until you succeed

HSE should long since have imposed a maximum level of music and a minimum level of illumination in shops and Hollister would have to conform. Revolting place.

All that 'positive' stuff in classrooms would have made me give up as a child. They are always about amazing outstanding people who achieve beyond their wildest dreams, but in reality someone has to man the tills at Lidl, or plumb in toilets or do other mundane but necessary jobs.

My son also has epilepsy so what is he? Epileptic or autistic ?

He's just a kid with epilepsy and autism !

Hope, a few years back, I reinstated a nature table in my classroom. Very little writing, lots of found objects that were meant to be handled and thought about.
They wrote questions and information on paper and left them so that others could respond or just think about what they'd discovered.
Got a lot of high-level thinking from children that weren't really accessing my learning walls and word banks and whatnot that SLT and OFSTED insist I also had on my walls.
Teachers have very little autonomy in the classroom now in England. You have to slip between the cracks in the decrees.

The solitary wanderer that has been happening for years. Consecutive governments sucking the joy out of what used to be the best job in the world.

Yep, mainstream primary school classrooms are amongst the least autistic friendly places you can get. Not allowed to expect silence anymore - and stuff covering every single inch of the walls - grrrr. And corridors in secondary schools. Just constant noise and jostling.

Ikea. Only taken ds once. He was really, really distressed. You can't get out easily and it's absolutely packed with people to what feels like unsafe levels.

Any supermarket except for Waitrose, oh, and one of our smaller Tescos is fine - no music, lots of natural light.

Cinema - because everyone else behaves appallingly these days and ds can't stand people not obeying rules. He still goes; we just try and guess which might be the quietest showing. He can 'do' theatre as he loves it so much.

We took our son bowling recently. Only the second time. Thankfully we remembered his ear defenders. Definitely a sensory overload. Load disco music, close proximity to other lanes busy with families, the bang as the ball dropped, fluorescent lighting, multiple screens displaying scores that then randomly showed advertising, arcade games to the entrance, cafe and soft play behind lanes. We were really proud of him because he enjoyed the actual bowling.
The other places he really struggles with is swimming pools.

DS couldn't cope in mainstream schools they were too loud, too bright, too noisy, too crowded, he was also unable to cope in any supermarket basically for the same reasons.

A little off topic but I recently had the dubious pleasure of trying to secure a work experience placement for my DS, as he is at an out of area school it is down to the parents to get a local placement, the LEA were unhelpful, local supermarkets wanted to know if DS would have a support worker and on being told no their answer was sorry we can't help you, ditto local café's, restaurants, etc etc etc, DS doesn't need a support worker he just needs some reasonable adjustments and little extra support.

My DD did work experience in a charity shop, and they were great about reasonable accommodation.

My son was chucked into the mainstream aged 11, not long after Blunkett had decided that because he had a bad time at a special school, special schools/units should be axed...

So son went from being in a class of 6 in a special unit, with two teachers, TAs, everything calm and quiet... to a mainstream High School where he had to share a TA with numerous others, and all the noise and chaos, deeply distressing him. Still, am sure the government saved some money.

Being mainstreamed might have suited Blunkett as a child but it did autistic kids no favours.

I was teaching several years earlier in another LEA where they started shoving SEN kids into the mainstream and over a few months, I went from having a class of 24 to a class of 30 (not good for any of the kids). Two of my SEN kids had badly clashing needs. I had never been trained although as the mother of two kids with SEN myself, was willing to learn how to help those kids. No INSET training. And that was in the days when you couldn't actually ask TAs to work as it might be 'demeaning' which meant I was running round like a blue arsed fly every break and lunch hour preparing the extra resources for my visually impaired child.

The mainstream classroom generally is not a place for kids with autism. But those legislating don't give two hoots about anyone with disabilities, as the recent tory attacks on the disabled have shown.

enter, when my son had to do work experience, the school hit on the idea of sending him to the Art Dept at the local college. Which was great as he was going to college the following year... to do Art! They just made use of him helping put up work for exhibition, etc and they grew to have a real affection for him.

So much so that when we went there the next year, to visit to see how they could accommodate his autism, a couple of the lecturers gave him a huge hug when he walked in. (Which he is OK with!)

And I knew right then it was the place for him to be.

He ended up being at College for 5 years and they went out of their way to secure the funding to keep him there, the last couple of years. They also had excellent support throughout - unlike the school. School hadn't done a thing for him in the 5 years he was there - he was just down in the bottom group for everything, and no real effort was made. As a result he left school unable to read and with no qualifications. But thanks to college, he is now at uni - it was totally down to him and them, that he got his BTECs and got in. Despite the noise etc of the college, he was given an environment and support where he could find his niche. I doubt all high schools are as bad as my son's - but our experience was that Further Education is better geared up than 11+...

Unfortunately our experience of FE was nowhere near as good as school. :(

one of the adjustments my DS's school did was to create him his own work space because he was struggling with the sensory overload in the classroom.

He's facing the window in the corner of the classroom, but they keep the blinds on that pane closed so he just has a cream space. They they've put 2 board up, one in front and one to the side.

its all very muted colours, and on the are some photos of his family and pets and his routine for the day. He only has to face the rest of the classroom for brief moments and has all his sensory aids on his desk, and his TA sits between him and the class.

Mainstream classroom's. Definitely.

Motorway service stations. We usually have to go off the motorway for loo stops as ds2 can not cope at all. Far too busy and overwhelming. Never mind those dyson hand-dryers.

My pet hate at the moment though is all the interactive museums who insist on having loud commentaries on everything whether or not anybody is there listening or not. ds2 can not stand these and we rapidly have to leave. I keep meaning to ask if they ever have quiet days when they switch the intrusive things off.

My son was assessed by the Disabled Students Allowance people for the various aids etc he needs for uni. He was given a Mac Air Book to do his work. He hates it and keeps harking back to his beloved cheap laptop he got in Tescos 4 years ago. Why does he hate the Mac? Because its case feels "too smooth" and makes him feel sick when he touches it (He has dyspraxia as well as autism). We keep trying to convince him it's a brilliant thing, he got a state of the art laptop for his work - which he needed anyway as all the software he uses are for Macs not other operating systems and he was having to use the ones at uni, before...

He won't be convinced that everyone isn't squicked out just touching his laptop. We did an experiment and made everyone in the family touch the laptop - only his dyspraxic younger brother also wanted to hurl just touching the laptop's top... He still insists we're weird for not wanting to throw up when we touch the laptop.

You need something like this Joff

www.incase.com/shop/macbook-cases/incase-textured-hardshell-case-for-macbook-pro-13/

(But textures generally are a 'mare aren't they? I'll never get out of the habit f stroking before I buy )

Ta Gooseberry. I never got him something for it because I thought he was exaggerating at first (I know) or he'd get used to it... but he hasn't!

Why does he hate the Mac? Because its case feels "too smooth" and makes him feel sick when he touches it. He is so right! It's not even smooth, it just feels...wrong! I thought it was just me - they are horrible to touch'