The lived experiences of primary and secondary education for autistic university students

Policy calls for inclusive practices to facilitate the integration of diverse autistic school students into mainstream education. This poses challenges for teachers and autistic students and retrospective accounts can make sense of the experiences of autistic. This study explored experiences of mainstream education in six autistic university students through semi-structured interviews facilitated by images chosen by participants. Three themes and four subthemes were identified through thematic analysis of the data: 1) Inaccessibility; 2) Support (Subthemes: Supportive Teachers; Inadequate Support Provision) and 3) Challenging Peer Relationships (Subthemes: Social Interaction Challenges; Isolation and Difference). Recommendations for improving inclusive support provision for autistic students in mainstream education included appropriate support and training for teachers, reasonable adjustments to the physical environment and inclusion of lived experiences when developing related future policies. Future research should consider a multi-informant approach and other groups such as those who do not progress to higher education for a more holistic understanding of the inclusion of autistic students in mainstream education.