Breaking autism's work barrier: Jolanta Lasota, chief executive, Ambitious about Autism

Jolanta Lasota has been chief executive of Ambitious about Autism for seven years. To coincide with Autism Awareness Month in April, the charity launched a campaign to improve how the education system prepares young people with autism for the world of work.

Why is the new campaign needed?
The Employ Autism campaign is inspired by the young people on our youth council. They told us that their biggest concern was about young people accessing work.

They’re telling us that their preparation for work has been patchy and their expectations for getting a job are low.

We know that if we were to tackle barriers to employment for young people with autism, the country would save £9bn a year.

What changes do you want to see?
The three things we’re calling for through the campaign are better careers advice for people with autism, better access to work experience and more opportunities for young people aged 16 to 19 to develop skills.

We know that fewer than one in four young people with autism progress to any form of education or training beyond school – they need to have those opportunities to develop skills for work and life.

What are the main barriers to achieving  that and how can they be overcome?
The first thing we have to tackle is low aspirations for young people with autism. They don’t believe they will be offered a job.  

In addition, they don’t necessarily access careers advice and work experience, and the sort of skills they need at school or at college have to be provided for young people with autism. They need it more than anyone else. Earlier in the year, we campaigned for teacher training to include information and support on autism. Of course, funding is becoming an issue of concern for everybody. But we are positive there is capacity in the funding system to do it – we think it is essential.

We believe in recognising a child’s needs early on. Providing universal and specialist services in mainstream schools is part of the answer to some of the budgetary challenges that local authorities and central government face.

Every teacher needs to know how to support children with autism, and we know that part of the answer to tackling some of the issues efficiently is early intervention. That does not just mean pre-school children, but recognising children of all ages with those needs in the mainstream system, and providing the adjustments they need.

How can schools do that on a practical level?
The curriculum needs to be adjusted to incorporating employability skills for those young people. In particular, they need good, specialist careers advice.

We have called for a national expert in special educational needs (SEN) for careers advisory services. We really believe that there needs to be careers advice at a national level that is developed locally for the needs of these young people.

We must also ensure autistic young people get out into the workplace, as we know they need to learn in that environment.

We need to make sure we are closing the gap in terms of ensuring their transition from school to further education or training, and that all their learning does not stop at 16.

So this includes ensuring that parents have the aspiration for their child. We’re working with parents, for example, to showcase adults who are in the workplace so they can see that is a possible outcome for their child, and realising that aspiration, very early on, is important for the young person and parents and carers.

What changes can government make?
We need an SEN strategy that addresses early intervention and support for young people with autism. We’ve seen proposals for all schools to become academies and are about to receive a plan for a new schools funding framework. But we have not seen a holistic SEN strategy.

I don’t think anybody has calculated what the implications are of changing the schools funding framework, the way we measure progress for children below national curriculum levels, and what happens if we do that all at once. We must ensure it doesn’t disadvantage children with autism.

What would a specialist SEN strategy contain?
We need to look at what schools we need for children, what the gap in skills is for supporting children with SEN, and how we support different levels of need. Primarily it needs to address how to prevent a cost escalation for children with SEN because a failing system will see an escalation in cost for these children.

We’re seeing lots of mainstream education and policy going through that tries to address SEN but what we need is a cohesive strategy to address SEN at the beginning. We’re not seeing that at the moment.

Jolanta Lasota CV