Best Universities for Autistic DD with social anxiety. Looking for flexibility

[whatisgoingonandwhy]

Posting for traffic. DD has autism but is very bright academically. She struggled a lot in high school but has flown in her A levels as she is attending an online college. She would like to study psychology and work with autistic children in some capacity. Has recently started to make progress in socialising more but is extremely daunted at the prospect of having to attend classes. Are there any Uni’s that have the flexibility to attend classes in person or online, or any that are particularly supportive for those who are neurodivergent?

This is great advice. Mum of autistic DD. DD took a gap year during which she travelled a little and also worked part time. She attends Birkbeck in London where she is doing her degree over 4 years, ie part time. This reduces the pressure, and allows her time to chill a little. She also works part time still too. All going well. she has regular support from personal tutor from uni.

Blind people create art via touch.
This thread is about high academic ND kids not those who can’t pass GCSE.

The English teacher is being screwed over by her school spending the EHCP money on something else. She should have insisted that it was spent on support for her. And again these are not high achieving kids. So is A level the right course for them?

But plenty of ND kids are bright and academic. So these arguments don’t stand up.

Reasonable adjustments.

https://www.scope.org.uk/advice-and-support/asking-for-reasonable-adjustments

And here it is……

If you don’t get the suggested adjustments in your needs report it is discrimination. All this ‘don’t read reports🙄’

And highly academic kids should be the ones in uni.

Art created through touch i agree with, hence saying about sculpture. I would however be interested to see how a blind person could paint a subset if eptheyve never seen one.

But lecturers are saying they shouldn’t because they’ve got social anxiety or need too much support.

I think many of the younger people needing a very different university experience will inevitably struggle to get work. It’s clearly a very expensive issue for employers and, at a time when jobs aren’t there for grads (1/3 down) employers have a decent choice of grads. Why would they want someone who cannot do important aspects of the work? It’s unrealistic to expect that they would.

With psychology - a degree is the start. There’s years to go after that in academia and the NHS in order to become a psychologist. Only around 20% of psychology grads go on to get qualified and that’s probably high at the moment. How can we have psychologists who cannot work with people. Their appointments are not all on line! The training is onerous. You won’t just get to work with Autistic dc. Maybe as an Ed Psych you will see some but the career goals seem unrealistic.

The difficulty with providing adjustments for disabled students in university is the sheer number of people / departments involved - and that almost inevitably means that not everyone delivering the adjustments has been consulted about their reasonableness. That in turn means that what is documented in ‘centrally prepared’ plans may in practice not be deliverable.

In my experience of a student developing a disability while at university- a disability that has impacts on accommodation; travel; all academic work both theoretical and practical; physical access; mental health etc etc etc - creating and negotiating reasonable adjustments, often week by week or event by event, has been an enormously onerous process for the student because they are the only person who can be in contact with every part of the university.

Yes, the ‘basic paperwork’ was created by the central disability service but they can only really commit to deliver what they themselves organise and deliver. All other aspects, in our experience, has to be negotiated with whoever is delivering them, because only the deliverer can genuinely judge what constitutes reasonable adjustments for them.

This is different from much smaller institutions like schools or workplaces, where there just aren’t so many different deliverers/ people and functions involved.

😲

(On a side note, I think that the culture of expectation that ‘teachers must themselves deliver everything all children need, regardless of the unreasonable impact of this on the teacher’s own workload and health’ that rules schools means that the move to university is a shock. Parents and students transfer this ‘teacher’ expectation to lecturers/ tutors, and are then genuinely surprised that lecturers have not - for really good reasons - taken on the same burdens)

We don’t get their learning support plans. Student services do and they put the processes in to support the student there - separate rooms for exams, learning support assistants, specialist software, etc. Their role is to provide the ‘scaffolding’ to enable participation alongside the other students.

We are not teachers - we mostly don’t know our students. How could we pick out one student, or 20-30 students in a class of 200, and know each of their individual support plans? We will likely only see them one or two hours a week for one semester and they may well have 12+ lecturers teaching them over that period - maybe 2-3 weeks one lecturer will take them for one part of a module, and then it will change to another. They will also have different seminar tutors. You can’t expect every academic to know every support plan for every student who has one.

The support happens at the student support level - that’s where special arrangements are made. There are things that all academics at my institution must do and they have already been alluded to here - putting slides up in advance, making assessments as inclusive as we can, making sure the language we use is inclusive, providing plenty of resources, etc. but our responsibility lies in the competent delivery of the module as a whole.

If one of our personal tutees is not engaging (either through the VLE or going to class) then we get sent an automated email and we follow up with the student - though they will not often engage with us either and we flag that with student services. If they do, we are required to signpost them to the relevant services. We are not mental health professionals or experts and cannot give advice that may well be incorrect. We are physicists, or historians, or whatever. That said, the university does employ specialist mental health/disability counsellors and experts, and every student will have access to them.

I do agree with having some realism about a future careers, but I do think its important to remember that university is a time of personal growth. With the right support someine could go from socially anxious to much better able to deal with these things. If op says she is improving, this could really start to gain traction.

4 years ago my son couldnt go into a classroom. In fact he couldnt go indoors with other people basically. He had an extreme trauma response. He can now stand up in a classroom and deliver a speech. In another 5 years he could develop enough to be a teacher.

@MayaPinion that is exactly what I was referring to when I posted about parents / students equating ‘lecturer / tutor’ with ‘school teacher’ and having the same expectations of each.

Part of the issue may be that central student support / disability services may write things into plans that are not in practice deliverable (tbh this is also a problem in school, in both expert reports and in SEN / EHCP plans - which often list a wish-list that might be deliverable if a child was 1:1 with the teacher but is not deliverable 1:32).

The disability person shouldn’t have written that. That’s not what we do as academics. If we have 30+ tutees are we expected to write to them every single week? That’s unrealistic and I don’t know what use it would be. If your DD needs weekly mental health support she needs to reach out to the university’s disability support service. That’s where her tutor would signpost her if there was an issue.

My question would be whether the disability services came up with that idea directly- as in, offered it spontaneously as a ‘normal reasonable adjustment’ offered by that specific university- or whether you requested it / transferred it straight over from a previous school document?

I think it is reasonable to hold the university to account if they genuinely offered it as part of their normal ‘menu of adjustments’ (though hold the disability services may write to account not the tutor - they offered it, they need to chase it up). Not reasonable if they just transcribed it across from school provision - in that case, I think it may be better to go back to the disability service and say ‘it doesn’t look as if this can be delivered as it’s not something the academic can offer - can you come up with an alternative that achieves the same, eg a referral to an individual within the university disability support service, or to a student mentor (ime, there was some access to specific postgraduate students who were mentors to those who needed some ‘academic / study’ support).

No it was offered by the uni. It wasn’t taken from anything from school, and Dd was hardly likely to ask for it was she?!

What has the disability services said about its non-delivery?

For the last time. She doesn’t need mental health suppport. Her mental health is fine apart from this one thing.

Open Uni is all online. Most uni’s record lectures so she can watch them afterwards but seminars are not recorded.

Oh and I should say, she needs to look into a uni with financial stability. Preferably a Russell if she has the grades. Lots of courses are being axed, particularly in post 92’s and lecturers are being made redundant left, right and centre. Could be disruption to her course, an academic tutor she relies could lose their job etc.

So what support does she need?

Her Tutor to check in once a week. That’s it. She’s been given a printer by DSA and people to help her to advocate for herself.

But until this works ( and it only started last week) she just needs this transitional support.

my autistic (and probably ADHD) dd is currently looking at uni. She is in year 13.

She has decided to take a gap year, she recognises that she is not yet ready to be 100% independant. But also that she is quite burnt out after 2 years of A levels, and needs time to regroup. She also recognises that knowing she has to leave home in 2 months would have an impact on her exams in June.

For her gap year she is looking at an internship in her church, or a job and then some courses she wants to do eg BSL. In that year she is also going to learn how to cook and look after herself. You might ask why she hasn't done that already, (as her older siblings did) and the answer is that she has no capacity outside of school.

In terms of uni, she will receive DSA (disabled student allowance) alongside the PIP she already gets, and DSA comes will loads of support at uni, an academic mentor, access to all sorts of tech (eg note taking support tech) etc.
Every uni we have visited have also been fine with us asking things about her choosing accommodation (she will need ensuite) and possibilities of staying in uni accommodation in second year due to the stress of finding friends to share with (she has huge issues around friendships) and they have all been amazing.

2 that have stood out from the ones we looked at were Sussex, which is also small and friendly, and Leeds. My friends severly autistic dd with high medical needs has gone to Bath and they have a LOT in place for disabled students there.

Just to say, I fully expect to need to travel to visit her once a month (or more) as needed in the first year, to help her 're-set'. (room tidy, food shop, clean sheets, put clothes in wash). Only as long as she needs it, which by then might not be at all, but she needs that at home at the moment still. I have 2 older ones who I waved off to uni and expected to get on with it, so I am not remotely a helicopter mum, and need to recognise what my dd's needs are, rather than what the world thinks an 18 year old can do.

No - lectures are saying that the support that some students have listed on their study support plans isn’t realistic to add to someone’s workload. No one at all has said academic ND kids shouldn’t go to uni. No one. People are just pointing out the practicalities. Some unis are really good at this stuff. Others are not - poor staff training maybe, but more likely simply work overload and unreasonable expectations from students. Uni is not school. Uni is the same as work. Adjustments should be made to enable the YP to study/work,IF THEY ARE REASONABKE. But the other stuff the personal and social stuff unis and employers are not there to provide those.

It does sound is if your YP is at a uni where her SSP is not being delivered as it should be, for whatever reason, and I’m sorry, but glad she’s managing despite that.

It’s also good to hear of unis that are supportive, but it has to be a two-way street, with the YP thinking ‘what environment is going to give me the best chance’ rather than ‘I’m going here and they’ll have to provide extra support because I haven’t made a sensible choice.’

Oh believe me being a RG does not make a uni immune to cuts - see Nottingham and Cardiff in the last week. Also: https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

Thinking back to the OP, one of the big challenges of university is the number of changes happening all at once:

• Study, which will be more self-managed and independent
• Accommodation
• Independent living - food, cleaning, laundry, healthcare etc
• Socialising, making new friends, interacting with a wide variety of unknown people
• New town / city
• Removal of ‘automatic / immediate’ support from parents & family
• For students with a disability, move to independence in managing this and in self-advocacy

This is a LOT all at once. It may be best, if possible, to break down the individual components and address them separately over time rather than all at once.

So you could, for example, make your DC responsible for their own self-care - food, laundry, cleaning, healthcare - while based at home.

They could take on a specific social event / hobby event regularly, that they access wholly independently, as preparation for joining a similar club at uni.

You could gradually withdraw from being ‘default support’ and advocate, while your DC is still in the familiar home environment.

They could separate the study from everything else by doing OU from home, or attending a local uni, giving them more time to develop the skills needed for other things.

Alternatively, there may be a way for them to move into other accommodation but eg do a familiar job placement, rather than also taking on studying.