Bio: Melanie Grabowski is a recent graduate of the MA Education with Montessori program at Anglia Ruskin University. She has been home-educating her two neurodivergent children through their secondary school education for the past 4 years and currently runs a small Montessori provision for home-educated children who would struggle to access traditional learning environments. Melanie is passionate about educational equity and neuro-inclusion and advocates for a transformed education system in which every child can thrive.
Finding the right educational fit for neurodivergent children
When schools closed in March 2020, our family exhaled. I realised that for two years at least, I hadn’t been breathing. My daughter, Lily, had become a shell of herself and therefore so had I. She was 13.
For us, the initial Covid lockdown was a gift. It removed the tsunami of school distress that drowned us every single day and gave us time and space to breathe. We decompressed. We could start to relax. We began to re-discover joy.
Our search for the right educational environment for my daughter, and subsequently my son, began a decade earlier than that. I was fortunate to live in a part of the world where several schooling options were available to us as a family: state-funded mainstream; private independent and alternative education such as Montessori and Steiner-Waldorf. Due to government subsidisation, fee-paying options were financially accessible to the average family. Furthermore, alternative curriculums had been mapped to the national curriculum, validating their efficacy in the eyes of government and regulatory bodies. I remember feeling incredibly grateful for the choices available for my children’s education.
I didn’t know about autism then. I hadn’t heard of neurodivergence, and SEND was a distantly familiar term. Lily was highly anxious in general and especially in social settings and in some situations was unable to speak. I never had intentions of private or alternative education. But when it came time to find an early learning setting for her, I discovered that the typical mainstream settings on offer would be overwhelming. I had heard of Montessori education but knew very little about it beyond the usual myths and misconceptions. Only that it was ‘different’. There happened to be a long-established Montessori school a short walk from our home that I had never previously considered. I went to an open day. It looked and felt very different to my conditioned understanding of ‘school’, but I fell in love with it, albeit with a tad of scepticism.
The paradoxes within Montessori education make it tricky to make sense of at first glance. Children are afforded autonomy and freedom in their learning alongside a reassuring degree of structure, calmness and responsibility. The development of independence is a core tenet within an atmosphere of care and nurture. In the absence of punishments and rewards there is a developmentally appropriate focus on self-discipline and intrinsic motivation. I was intrigued. I was studying psychology at the time and through that lens it made sense in so many ways. And it felt right for us. I enrolled Lily, and it has turned out to be the best educational decision I ever made for my children. They both thrived, academically, socially, emotionally. I became a teacher there. And both as a teacher and a parent I felt part of a community in which all the adults were like co-carers in the lives of my children.
I’m not sure if parents of children who are considered neurotypical would understand the level of stress involved in seeking just the right type of school environment for their children. I have often felt envious of the ease with which most parents send their children to their closest state funded school, without a second thought.
We moved to England in 2017. There were no Montessori schools in our area and even if there were, they would have been financially out of reach. However I discovered a mainstream primary daring to do things a little bit differently. Lily spent year 6 with a fantastic teacher who prioritised connection over curriculum, and despite the wobbles and bad days and struggle, it was a fairly positive experience for both children overall. It was the head teacher there who first suggested autism to me. It took me a while to properly consider this, but when I did, a paediatrician did an ASD screener and the long assessment process began. The real difficulties began on transition to secondary. I had deliberately chosen the smallest secondary school I could find. We had to move house for it. The first week went well. Then life took a downward turn.
No-one understood what we were experiencing. I didn’t understand what we were experiencing. I didn’t know it had a name. For a month I managed to get Lily to school sporadically. She was given 1:1 support, and even though each of these people were lovely and connected well with Lily, over the two years she was at school this person changed five times. Lily rarely attended lessons. I was concerned about her academically, but knew she was bright and capable and what good were academics without health? She was put on a reduced timetable. I had to reduce my work days to match. When Lily couldn’t make it to school, she would only lie on the couch and cry silent tears. The pressure of school felt constant and heavy.
The following is an excerpt from my recent MA dissertation on autism, anxiety-based-school-absence and enabling/disabling learning environments.
The Tea Party: Setting the Scene for a mother’s experience of ABSA.
I understand that it is all very well intended.
We sit in a drafty Georgian room meant for meetings, painted grey-blue with a grand empty fireplace in the centre of the back wall; there’s a large bowl of pinecones on the mantle. There is a lace tablecloth covering an oval mahogany table where we sit. I am sipping from a dainty pink cup and I’m making my lips into a smile. The counsellor sits opposite. And another young girl, the same age as Rosie, sits beside her. The girls don’t know each other; they don’t speak. Rosie can’t speak anyway, sometimes, not with her voice or with her eyes or with her body. She sits very still, nibbles a plain scone trying not to move her jaw, she doesn’t want it but it is the polite thing to do. She stares at the teapot on the table.
There is small talk. I am doing well at putting on a face. A pleased one, a hopeful one. A thank-you-for-doing-this one. I act like I think this is a good idea because I don’t want to come across as a problem, that I’m not trying, that I’m being difficult, that I don’t care, that I am dismissive of the importance of education. After all, I have been teaching children for most of my adult life.
Behind my mask is the truth of things. It is terrifying watching Rosie slip away, knowing why and feeling helpless to stop it. Knowing it won’t be fixed by tea parties and counselling and quiet rooms and being polite. The whole place is wrong, like shoes three sizes too small.
I know what the right place looks like. In that place was a different Rosie, a singing Rosie, and a different me. It is like having knowledge of a peaceful park in the middle of a war zone and the gates to the park are open to some people but locked to you. And you are stuck with the air raids and rubble.
So, I have no choice but to go along with these attempts to fix things that are really like handing Rosie a walking stick for a severely broken leg and saying, there, that should do it. Like saying, we’re trying, we’re doing our bit, that’s all we’ve got really, you just need to stop limping now, Rosie, come on.
Four months before, Rosie became unable to get out of bed, unable to speak even at home, unable to eat and barely able to move, when faced with the thought of school, which is always, because school has become a heavy fog that has made Rosie invisible.
And here I am, smiling and disappearing too. They are telling me what must happen, that Rosie needs to come to school, because they can’t help unless she’s in, and I know I can’t make that happen without hurting Rosie but who am I to say it? I am just ‘Mum’. Mum says Mum thinks, eye roll. I am an empty noun on an important report bullet-pointing all the things wrong with Rosie. But I need to stay on side. I can only grieve silently for the brilliant bright child who is sitting right beside me, a child they can’t see and have never seen and will never see through all this collapsing and expanding dust. So, I stay with the smiling and nodding, and the swallowing of all this, these scones, and this dread, this plum jam that I can’t even taste. Because I am a ghost-mother, which is what you become when your child can’t go to school.
At the end of August 2019, with a new school year looming, Lily questioned the point of her being alive. That September and the 7 months following until lockdown were the darkest times. Lily was so burnt out that at school she slept in the ‘quiet’ room. She was alone, with no friends and was very rarely in lessons. Not only was she not receiving an education, despite me managing to ‘get her in’ most days, her mental health was spiralling at a frightening pace. She was attending school, but at the same time she was absent from it. I dread to imagine what might have been had schools not closed when they did in March 2020.
Our school had a level of SEND four times the national average; many children had 1:1 support. During lockdown, it was taken over by an academy trust. Twenty support staff lost their jobs. I asked how Lily would be supported when schools re-opened in September. I was told there would be no 1:1 support for her. She would be expected to attend every lesson and stay for at least 20 minutes. She could have an exit card to the ‘quiet’ room if she felt overwhelmed, but this would be a short-term approach. Lily had rarely been able to attend lessons for almost two years even with 1:1 support. Just crossing the threshold of a classroom was enough to trigger a shutdown. I knew that just getting Lily onto school grounds knowing she had no support would be nigh on impossible. The SENDCo knew this too. She said it was all she could offer under the new school policies. She suggested home education.
This meeting happened in the week before the summer holidays. We were in the midst of a global pandemic. I could not visit any specialist schools, and I was told by the LA that they would likely not be appropriate for Lily anyway. She was too academic. And I knew deep down they were right. Nevertheless, I called several specialist provisions and private independent schools and felt overwhelmed by the hoops I would have to jump through with no guarantee of success. Lily was about to enter her GCSE years having had very little education for almost two years. It all felt too hard. I gave up. I called an emergency EHCP review. And by the end of September 2020, I found myself ‘electively’ home-educating, a term I resent because it wasn’t a choice, there was no other option available.
I had a vantage point that many parents don’t have. When school is just school, and your child can’t go, when you see so many others managing fine, you wonder what you’ve done wrong. You question your child, you question yourself. You take all the blame and you pass it on to the detriment of the mental health of your whole family. But I knew my children were not broken. They had been in a school which they loved, where they were progressing, where they had friends, where they attended happily every day. A school they were upset to leave at the end of term and were excited to get back to at the beginning of it. Because we had experienced this, I knew the problem was not them. The problem was the environment. As an educator supporting children with additional needs in the same schools as my children, I was witness to how the environment had an impact on whether children flourished or floundered. This is what led to my research.
Recent literature shows an emerging understanding of anxiety-based-school-absence and school distress experienced amongst academically capable ACYP that is related to aspects of mainstream school environments, pointing to a misalignment in standard educational provision and autistic learner needs. These environments could be described as disabling; significant declines in mental health and even trauma are reported as a result, along with impacts on family stress.
Montessori education may not be a total panacea to the current crisis we face, but it certainly worked for my children and anecdotally it works well for other neurodivergent children who are thriving in Montessori environments. It incorporates a well-developed approach supported by a cohesive curriculum that stands up against national curriculum frameworks, with well-established teacher training programs, professional overarching organisations and is orientated towards a culture of equity and inclusion.
The core principles of Montessori Education appear to be inherently supportive of the social, emotional and academic needs of autistic learners. The approach strikes a balance between adherence to principles, curriculum and orderly environments while at the same time valuing and respecting the rights and individuality of children and young people (Eacott & Wainer, 2023). For parents of autistic children, these alignments highlight the potential of an alternative educational approach that may not have been previously considered.
What my experience and research tell me, is that there is an urgent need for different types of learning environments, otherwise a radical change to the current system to one that is built on an approach that can respond to individual difference. Currently, between mainstream and specialist there is a provision gap which so many children are currently falling into. We are all unique individuals, and one size never fits all.
Autistic children and young people may be absent from mainstream schools but they are not absent from life. They are here, they want to learn and they want to be included. If they are missing from the school register it is because they are missing from policy, and from appropriate developments in pedagogy and practice. The government has a responsibility to provide all of England’s children with the education they have a right to, and the education they deserve. Montessori education is an example of a structure and approach worth serious consideration in terms of inclusive models of practice. Just imagine the long-term economic and health benefits if all children were able to access quality education in a learning environment that really worked for them?
My full masters research dissertation on autism, ABSA and the Montessori environment is available to read here (PDF) Autism, Anxiety-Based-School-Absence and the Montessori Environment as an Actualised Model of Inclusive Practice.
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