My experience of having a teaching assistant throughout my school years: An autistic adult’s perspective.
By Josh Collins: Our Newsletter writer at Reachout ASC
September 2024
Teaching Assistants can work 1:1 with some autistic children in schools.
From my first day of reception to the final question on my third physics paper in June of 2016, I have had a teaching assistant sat beside me, or with me, in some capacity. For many across the country, a teaching assistant is going to be one of the people they spend the most time with. I was not a unique case; this was also true for me.
Over my time, I have developed strong emotional bonds with teaching assistants. Other times, I have had the opposite; having either silently or very verbally wishing to have someone else in their place. Regardless of how I feel about them, they have all bagsied a plot of land in my memory and summative ideal of a teaching assistant.
Understanding your pupil
However, with teaching assistants having the assistance of teaching in their title, I am sure you will agree that the only person who spends more time with us than teaching assistants is ourselves. I cannot help you with the full picture of what it is like for every autistic child with a 1:1 TA, but I can give you which frame best goes with our wallpaper and which hues and shades best fit the composition. Ultimately: helping you help us. From this point forward, I will be relaying to you the many experiences and reflections I have had on teaching assistants.
Time is a big thing for me. How time feels to me is an important part of how I process the world. If time feels like it is moving too fast, then it feels like I am short of it, and it causes me to spiral about having time to enjoy life and causes me to feel overwhelmed. If time is moving too slowly, but I am enjoying it, then it feels like I am stretching out periods of my life I relish. Conversely, if it is moving too slowly in a period of my life that is painful, then those feelings start to become a constant as opposed to a transitory state of being, as though I cannot escape what I am feeling. When I have a toothache, I feel like it is going to last forever.
The best teaching assistants have made the good times long and the bad times short. My time was stretched beyond breaking point one time when I started at my new high school in year 8. Time with my teaching assistant bled into my break and lunch, staining the carpet wherever I walked. This was not because I needed her, but moreso her lack of faith in me led her to assert and ascend herself as a saviour figure. This was most definitely not needed. First impressions are everything, and having a teacher unabashedly mother me with every step I take, down the halls and corridors, in the lunch line, and as I leave the gates, was not only exhausting, but understandably humiliating.
It was the source of ridicule everywhere I went. Peers would often ask if she was my mum, and not having that control over how I am perceived feels oppressive. It’s a great way to get an autistic person (or virtually anyone else) to resent you.
Beyond time, she controlled my space, which is equally as important. She would send me out of classes the second I did not listen to her, which often felt like her attempt fitting me into the mold of a convenient helpee. Constant visits to the head of year made it feel like this teaching assistant was working against me, dobbing me in, providing more of a disruption to my own learning than any other source as opposed to being an advocate for me. Time spent in the head of year’s office and occasionally isolation was tautologically isolating, so the more time spent there also meant I was alienated further from my peers.
Autistic people live in a world where time and space work differently for them than everyone else, and where the absence of accommodations means they must take more time for themselves to overcome these obstacles. It also means less space in their minds to navigate an environment which might as well be as foreign to them as a country on the other side of the globe.
When teaching assistance is invasive
It is really important, therefore, to have someone on your side. Having someone who understands your way of operating and works with you is vital. I can remember another time where a teaching assistant was particularly invasive. I was once recorded and outright lied to about it once when I was in year 5. I was in a literacy lesson, and I was not sitting still. There was a point in the class where I moved my head and arms about for 2 seconds. It was minimally disruptive to the class, and I was not making any noises. Looking back, this was likely a form of stimming and letting energy out. It should come as no surprise to readers of this newsletter that sitting for an hour straight is unnatural not just for us neurodivergent folk. I was intelligent enough to recognise that I was being recorded, I could feel it at the back of my head. When I challenged my teaching assistant about it, she said it was a part of a project for her course. Although I was skeptical, I trusted my teacher and continued what I was doing. I also trusted her to tell me when there were any issues with my behaviour, so when I was shown this recording on her laptop the next day, I felt like my trust in her had been taken advantage of.
Perhaps this teaching assistant made the fatal error of believing that autistic children are completely inept at reading social cues, as opposed to having a divergent means of reading them. Perhaps they simply thought the ends justified the means and they were doing what was in my best interest, seeing how my behaviour might be perceived by other people, in the hopes this would cause me to change it. Having left high school 8 years ago now, I appreciate that most teaching assistants are sincerely trying their best to do what they can to help people with the time, resources, and energy they have. Unfortunately, that does not stop their uninformed actions causing long lasting damage.
Even today, I look over my shoulder at work too many times than I care to admit, in case someone is looking at my computer screen, even though I have nothing to hide. That feeling of eyes drilling into my skull, waiting to catch me out for an undesirable behaviour. Much like how the first teaching assistant was the source of ridicule and her mothering caused me to rebel against my teaching assistants and people who were even trying to help me. Another teaching assistant recorded me speaking putting on an Australian accent because my special interest was Australia at the time. I am sure that a 10 year old boy who wanted to be the Crocodile Hunter’s Boyfriend and live in their treehouse being homeschooled by Steve Irwin and hang out with cool animals must have got on some peoples’ nerves if they didn’t see the charm of it, but what followed was harrowing. She played the recording back to me, which I didn’t mind listening to. She told me how ridiculous I sounded, as though hurting my feelings was going to make me change how I went about my day. If anything, it made me want to double down. Today this still manifests as a self-consciousness that I have to combat.
Teaching Assistants should be at the core of building up autistic people to be their strange, beautiful selves: to make them confident autonomous people.
When teaching assistance works well
As much as I have gone on about bad examples, I would like to end on a positive note. Teaching assistants have been there for me, advocated for me, encouraged me to be more of myself and more than I currently was. From year 9 onwards, I had a brilliant teaching assistant, and brilliant SEN Department (who I eventually became an ambassador for). They were always providing me with opportunities to demonstrate to the rest of the teachers ‘Actually, Josh has something to share with the world. Actually, Josh cares about making an impact.’ And that meant a lot. I had a free lesson each week which was dedicated to functioning skills for socialising, hygiene, and self-sufficiency. The same department provided me with space to eat my lunch and use the microwave when I needed some alone time, or if I was having difficulties with friends or other students. When I didn’t get considered for a senior prefect role, they made a strong case in my favour considering all of the extracurriculars I took part in, and all the help I provided staff, and all the academic achievements I was making, and I got a senior prefect role. That meant my best friend and I could enjoy deputy head boy and senior prefect role together and put me in good steed for when I applied to colleges. This same department of SEN and teaching assistants also realised how important my special interest of the German language and got me a German tutor for Wednesdays after school out of their pot of SEND money. My best friend also got to take part. Had I done the short course for German, I would have got an A*, but that’s a story for another time.
In primary school, one of my teaching assistants made reward charts that used ants back in KS1, as my interest was ants at the time. I was so excited to take part in habits I needed to cultivate just to see the next ant on that chart. It was coloured in personally by the teaching assistant and laminated, I could from an early age tell the love that went into it. That love shines through, even if I didn’t recognise it as nothing more than a ‘warm fuzzy’ at the time, it really does shine through. This teaching assistant even took the time to learn the names of some Pokémon, even if they misspelled them, mispronounced them, and so on. Again, looking back, I was too focused by the fact that a teacher got something wrong to appreciate that what they were doing was actually incredibly thoughtful. Again, even though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, I did at least a bit then and I definitely do now.
A note from the Reachout ASC specialist teachers
It has always been important for us to work with teaching assistants as we know how valuable they can be. But there is a fine line between being the child’s nemesis and their hope of independence and being able to thrive in school. When we listen to the child, understand how they process the world and what interests them, we can forge a way into the world for them that works with their strengths and interests. We can be their advocate and their ally. Thank you to all the teaching assistants we have known who have done this, including those who Josh describes here.
We can help you. Sarah and Kirsten from our team have developed our TA support programmes and training. Please see here for our next courses, and do get in touch if you’d like to have training at your school.
https://reachoutasc.com/training/upcoming-training/
