When starting higher education in the UK, students are offered a needs assessment through the Disabled Students Allowance. For autistic students, disclosure often results in the option for a Specialist Mentor (Autism).
This study was built off a thematic analysis of diary entries given by Specialist Mentors across the UK. A group of seven autistic mentees co-created a set of questions for the Specialist Mentors to think about in their entries. An autistic majority group of master mentors led analysis. This participatory approach ensured results would be relevant to the autistic community.
Themes were spotted and used to create three key knowledge areas for specialist mentors: Understanding autism in higher education, knowing how the institutions operate, and the ‘craft’ of mentoring.
The ‘craft’ of specialist mentoring is framing and reframing. This is a way of thinking used by mentees to see barriers, and make workarounds with their mentor to bypass them. Mentors big job is to focus on motivating and inspiring their mentees.
Around one third of the mentors in this study were neurodivergent. In good mentoring – whatever the neurotype mix – people are working each other out. However, even more mentors with lived experience would be a good thing.
The paper finishes by saying that framing and reframing is at the heart of specialist autistic mentoring. Mentoring is a social act that needs the co-creation of tools and solutions with both the mentees and mentors. There is a need to move mentoring away from the goal of student productivity. Mentoring should not be about ‘normative practices’, which do not account for the autistic need for ‘down-time’. Good mentoring has “the potential to liberate students through the nurturing of self-determination”.
Summary by Hannah
Irvine, B. and MacLeod, A. (2025). ‘Mobilising Specialist Autism Mentoring in UK universities’. Journal of Inclusive Practice in Further and Higher Education, 17 (1), pp. 103–118.
Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10209767/.