Category Archives: Podcast

In episode 4 Eliza investigates how far our broken school system is not just failing autistic young people but everyone. Has the focus on league tables and standards lost sight of our children as human beings?

Finding Other Ways – In episode 3 Eliza finds out what happens when children leave the school system, what recovery looks like, and what alternatives there are to mainstream education when you know you need something different.

In episode 2 Eliza looks at how prioritising attendance means parents who can’t get their children to school are seen as feckless and their children as badly behaved. Meanwhile support for autistic children and their families is hard to access, until many are left at breaking point.

In this powerful four-part podcast, Eliza Fricker shares her experience, and that of others, to reveal the difficult process of getting an autism diagnosis, what this means in our current education system, and asks, can we find a better way?

With the help of leading autism experts Eliza explores the pressure to “fix” children to fit in and how many children are masking their true self to survive at school. She looks at alternative ways to educate children who don’t thrive in the mainstream model. And in light of the growing mental health crisis among young people, asks how far the UK school system is out of date and in need of reform. Are schools failing not just autistic children, but everyone? 

“My child wasn’t broken, they didn’t need to be fixed. Why was the onus on my child to fit the system – and not the system, to fit my child?” 

Currently almost two million children are regularly absent from school. Many of these will have special needs – making going to school a stressful and distressing experience. But in a system that prizes attendance over wellbeing, autistic children are forced into an environment that makes them unwell. Parents who want to safeguard their children are fined for non-attendance, and face an expensive uphill struggle to find alternative ways to educate their children. Yet there are other ways, including schools that focus on strength-based and autonomous learning. It’s in a setting like this that Eliza has seen her child heal and thrive.

Contributor quotes:

“The implication is that there’s a gold standard human being that everybody’s measured up against and if you’re perceived to have flaws then you’re broken in some way and you need to be fixed. But we can reframe those “weaknesses” and see them as strengths. Which is rarely done with autistic children.”
– Kieran Rose, autistic consultant and trainer.

“At school they value sitting quietly and I wasn’t doing that, and so I was told I was a juvenile delinquent. How can we run an education system that has no interest in a person’s personality and how they experience the world?”
– Graham Brown Martin, Author Learning Reimagined.

“We need to embrace what we know about children and personalise things where we can, because everybody is different. Kindness, flexibility, creating better relationships between parents and teachers and young people doesn’t cost anything.”
– Liz Soper, A Seat at the Table.

“Lots of people don’t thrive in our current educational system. We need to think about education in a much wider way. What if when children are going to school age four or five, it’s not a question of which school they go to, it’s a question of how are they best going to learn?”
– Dr Naomi Fisher, Author Changing Our Minds.