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Debate, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Dr Siobhan Lamb wanted classrooms where no student needed an accommodation
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, a panellist working in secondary education called neurodivergent students the canaries in the coal mine. A participant who works at Headspace warned that one design rarely fits every young person.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Dr Siobhan Lamb wanted schools to stop needing accommodations at all. Speaking on the education panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024, Lamb, who works in secondary education, said she calls her neurodivergent students the canaries in the coal mine. Often when one of them struggles with something, she told the room, most of the other students are struggling too, and are simply better at hiding it. If a neurodivergent student complains that the fluorescent lights are killing them, she said, half the class probably dislikes them as well and is not saying so.
Her conclusion was to take those cues and “get rid of accommodations by making all environments accessible to everyone”, so that students start on a similar playing field. The saddest thing she hears from her students, she said, is that no matter how much the school wants to help, “I don’t want to feel like a burden every day of my life.”
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Sources the story draws on
- Disability Standards for Education 2005 (Fact sheet 2) (opens in a new tab), Australian Government Department of Education
- Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0 (opens in a new tab), CAST
- Age Differences in Resistance to Peer Influence (opens in a new tab), MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice (record on PolicyArchive)
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