Sam Dexter, Anna Remington, Roan McAuley, Alice Willans, Joshua Gross, Katherine Culmer, Nimthiriel Littlebury, and Laura Crane (2025)
The team looked at how careers guidance is provided to autistic pupils in special schools in England. Careers guidance helps young people move from school into work, and schools must offer this support by law. Researchers asked staff in 103 special schools across England to fill out a survey about what careers support they provide. Then, they spoke in more detail with 20 of those staff members in interviews.
They found that staff try to make careers guidance personal to each autistic student, and they find the Gatsby Benchmarks (a government careers guidance framework) useful. Special schools are using many different ways to support autistic students with careers, including:
- Careers lessons in the classroom
- Work experience
- One-to-one careers advice
But, staff said that the biggest barrier in giving careers support was organising work experience for autistic students.
Research shows that work experience improves job chances for autistic people. It can do this because it helps young people decide what jobs they might like and helps build useful skills for work. Unfortunately, it is thought that many employers don’t seem to understand autism well, so there aren’t enough autism-friendly work placements.
What can be done about it?
Training can help employers learn more about autism. But training on its own isn’t enough. Employers need more support, not just online courses.
It might be a good idea to work with autistic people and parents, school staff, and employers to design better ways to offer work experience. This might be in creating templates and tools that employers can use to plan inclusive placements. And by making sure support is offered to all kinds of employers — not just big companies, but also smaller businesses that often offer work placements.
The paper suggests that changes are needed in policy and practice to make certain aspects of careers support more accessible and helpful for autistic young people in special schools.
