Understanding life in lockdown for autistic young people in Northern Ireland

As COVID-19 continues in Northern Ireland (NI), there is limited understanding of how this will impact the lived experience of children and young people with disabilities. In particular, autistic children in mainstream schools in NI have limited access to critical statutory support. This, combined with transitions to remote learning, is especially distressing. School learning support teams are attempting to support online learning for autistic young people during lockdowns. However, this is potentially exacerbated by the autistic students’ abilities to identify or express how lockdown restrictions are having an impact on their capacity for coping with remote learning. Through co-research with an autistic young people’s advisory group, this chapter explores the impacts of COVID-19 on online learning experiences of autistic young people in post-primary schools. The research specifically considers the challenges experienced by autistic young people during lockdown; the coping strategies developed by autistic young people during lockdown; recommendations for helping autistic young people manage in similar situations in the future. Photovoice is the participatory arts-based method (Wang & Burris, 1997), used in this study to capture autistic students’ (11–18) lives during lockdown as they learn at home. Their experiences are documented using smartphones enabling each young person to present insight into how lockdowns impacted their experiences. The young people’s advisory group then assisted the adult researchers with a thematic analysis of the Photovoice data. They provided guidance to ensure future online learning programs are accessible to autistic young people by presenting evidence-informed recommendations for education policymakers, schools, and parents.