We need a dose of reality and a healthy debate about autistic children

THAT poor child. He is aged 11, has autism and ADHD, and was left, says his mother, alone in a converted bathroom in a school in Co Kildare for five hours. His mother posted a photograph on the web showing him dismantling a light fitting, because he was frustrated.

If the Children’s Referendum meant anything, surely it meant an end to this violation of a child’s human rights.

Regulations about the use of ‘withdrawal rooms’ are decided by school boards, like far too much about our schools.

Regulation is said to be coming next year. It is urgently needed. A child should never be left unsupervised in a room in a school. If the child is too violent to be supervised by staff, he or she should be watched through a window. Such a “withdrawal” shouldn’t last for more than a few minutes, up to a maximum of 15 minutes in serious cases. At that point, the parents should be contacted, because the school can’t cope. If the parents are contacted too often, it’s clear the school situation isn’t working.

But the most important regulation is about why a child can be ‘withdrawn’. This must never be to punish the child. Withdrawal should only be used, as new US guidelines state, if the child’s behaviour “poses imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others.”

The lobby group, Parents Against Isolation Rooms, which highlighted the plight of the boy with the light fitting, goes further: they want the Government to ban all such “withdrawal rooms” in schools.

I am the mother of an autistic child and I am against a total ban. Here’s why. Many children and teens with autism and ADHD are violent. I’m sorry to have to put it so bluntly, but I’m saying it for a reason.

We need a serious dose of reality therapy here. Just this morning, after three years of relative peace, my mildly autistic son smashed a picture in his room, because his brother was singing. He came and told me and he said sorry. He is medicated and he goes to a special school. But I can remember moments from the bad old days, before that 0.25 of daily rispiridone and that class of six with a teacher and SNA, when I thought “where will I put him to keep him safe? Where will I put him to keep us safe from him? Will I lock him in the van?”

I didn’t.

But I don’t have a classroom of other children to protect. A classroom of children who have a right to their own personal safety, which will be zealously vindicated by their parents. And I’m a mother. I don’t have employment rights.

There is a “quiet room” in my son’s special school and it is padded with cushions. The words “padded cell” have entered my mind when I’ve seen it. But it has a big window and it opens into other rooms. I have never seen it in use, and if it is used I am confident that it is under careful supervision and for a number of minutes only, to allow a child the space to quieten, and to keep others safe from him or her, if necessary.

On rare occasions, I have gone into the school and found a serious ‘meltdown’ in progress. There is an air of high alert. The outside door of the school is locked. It’s terrible that such precautions need to be taken, but that is the universe: some of us have disabilities that can, on occasion, cause us to lose our reason.

I’m putting it all out there because I have seen the secret hell of some parents of autistic children. I know of a gorgeous teen who was arrested for threatening a stranger with a knife on the street. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but now he has a criminal record. The guards know him and though they have called on him several other times, his parents describes them as “brilliant”. But that didn’t make it any easier when the residents of the local estate signed a petition to force his parents to supervise him at all times. I know a parent who is in constant contact with the guards to locate her runaway, autistic pre-teen. This mother had physical fights in the house as she tried to keep her “big kid” in and is now giving thanks for the relative calm that a small dose of rispiridone has brought.

I know of a large teen with a different disability who assaulted the driver of the school bus. Now the driver won’t take the child on his bus. Who can blame him?

The parents of these children are among the most loving human beings I have ever met, but they have to live in the real world. I’m a candidate for the “withdrawal room” myself when I read the simplistic approach that many ignorant do-gooders, led by the media, take to this issue.

Comments posted on the Parents Against Isolation Rooms Facebook page (not by the charity itself) blame the rooms on forces of oppression, from the Catholic Church to the Roman and British empires.

But the hard truth is that schoolchildren who have autism are not “easy to work with”, as one person posted on the charity’s Facebook page. Neither is it true to say, as another posted, that “primary-level children with autism are not dangerous.”

“Meltdowns” are a symptom of autism and other, similar disabilities, because an impaired sensory system can’t process the information it is given.

Controlling them involves imparting coping skills to the child, but it also means controlling the amount of information that the sensory system receives. For all except very mildly autistic children, that means a class of no more than six.

More profoundly autistic children may need the one-to-one attention of an ABA setting. Niamh Deane, of Parents’ Against Isolation Rooms, has set up the Tabor Children’s Trust to fundraise for a Montessori school for special-needs children, which would have a ratio of one teacher for six children, plus two SNAs. This is exactly the ratio that is offered in many of the much-maligned special schools run by the State.

It is also exactly the ratio offered in our few autism-specific secondary schools, despite the Department of Education’s vain hope that with the benefits of special ratios at primary school the children’s sensory processing disorders will miraculously disappear.

The conversation we should be having is not just about the rights and wrongs of “withdrawal rooms”, but about the level of educational provision and support that autistic children and their families need. Slinging children who have serious sensory processing disorders into a mainstream class of 30, even with a special-needs assistant, because of some woolly idea that they should be “included”, is like kicking a legless child out of a wheelchair and saying “walk”.