A high school teacher’s case for putting more autistic teachers in schools

Kathleen put her argument to the opening panel of Think Autism Sydney as a chain of reasoning. She told the panel that “if we want to make things better for kids, we need to put more autistic teachers in schools”, and that getting more of them in meant “we need to stop torturing the ones that are in there.” She introduced herself from the floor as a high school teacher, and said that changing the way autistic teachers are assessed would be the subject of her PhD.

The panel had spent the previous half hour on the National Autism Strategy, procurement and funding. Kathleen said she loved the systems discussion and wanted to know what it meant for the professions. When she was not teaching she had worked in business process analysis, a job that required talking to people, which she said never went well. She was asking about becoming a teacher, she said, rather than about the classroom, and she asked the same question of dentists. She said the psychological association was looking at its competency standards, and asked what should be done about teaching standards and how a more neuroaffirming lens could be put on them. Her larger question was how the ideas the panel had raised about procurement, funding and social enterprise could be linked into professional bodies and the people who sit in them.