School taught me to sit still, not how to live: being autistic in the UK education system

I hated it, and I want to say that plainly#

I hated school.

I know that is not a rare thing to say. Plenty of people look back on it with a shrug or a bit of nostalgia. I do not. For me it was years of being somewhere I did not fit, being told that was my problem, and being marked on how well I could cope with it.

I am going to try to be fair. Some teachers were decent. Some things I learned were useful. This is not a post saying education is worthless. It is a post about a system that I think is built around the wrong things, and about what that costs when you are autistic.

What school is actually good at#

Here is what the UK system trained me to do, whether it meant to or not:

• Sit still, in a fixed seat, for hours.
• Move when a bell says to, whether or not I was finished.
• Memorise a lot of information and hand it back on one day.
• Do what I was told, in the order I was told, without asking why.
• Be marked against everyone else of the same age, as if we were all on the same track.
• Stay quiet about being overwhelmed, because making a fuss was the thing that got you in trouble.

Some of that has a place. Structure is not the enemy. But look at the list again and ask which of those you use in adult life. Almost nobody's job is to memorise and regurgitate under silent supervision for two hours. Nobody's day is split into forty five minute blocks by a bell. And in adult life, asking why is not insubordination. It is the job.

What it did not teach me#

The part that still annoys me is how much of real adult life was simply missing.

Money is the obvious one. In England, financial education is only a statutory part of the secondary curriculum, through citizenship and maths, and academies do not have to follow the national curriculum at all. A 2023 study by Compare the Market and MyBnk found that 61% of young adults did not recall receiving any financial education at school, and that those who did got about 48 minutes a month on average. The Money and Pensions Service found that only 47% of children had received a meaningful financial education, and a YouGov poll of teachers found 76% of them think most pupils finish their education without the financial knowledge they need for adulthood.

Read that last one again. It is the teachers saying it.

The Education Committee made the same point. Financial education is not directly inspected by Ofsted, so it gets treated as optional. One teacher quoted in research by Young Enterprise put it this way: "If it doesn't provide the school with something to boost their Ofsted rating, they'll not be interested." That is the whole problem in one sentence. What gets measured gets taught. What keeps you alive as an adult does not get measured.

And money is only one gap. Here is a rough list of things I had to work out for myself, later, mostly by getting them wrong:

• How a tenancy works, what a deposit is, and what to do when a landlord is useless.
• How tax, National Insurance, and a payslip fit together.
• How to cook properly and feed myself without it being a crisis.
• How to read a contract before signing it.
• How to look after my mental health before it falls over.
• How to know when I am heading for burnout, and what to do about it.
• How to be around people when it costs me energy.

None of that is exotic. All of it matters more day to day than most of what I got examined on.

The exam is not the test of real life#

School runs on one idea: you learn, then you are tested, then you get a grade, and the grade is who you are.

Real life does not work like that. In real life you can look things up. You can ask someone. You can take longer than the person next to you and still do it well. The work is usually ongoing, not one sitting. Nobody asks you to prove, from memory, in silence, in a gym hall, that you can solve a problem you will never need to solve without a search engine.

I am not saying exams are pointless. I am saying they measure one narrow thing, and a lot of people, me included, left feeling like the narrow thing was the measure of their whole worth. That stays with you for longer than the knowledge does.

Why it is so much harder when you are autistic#

This is the part I most want to get across, because "school was hard" is not the same as "school was hard in a way that was built against me".

The National Autistic Society's 2021 School Report surveyed over 4,000 autistic children, young people, parents, and carers. Some of what they found:

• Only 26% of autistic pupils said they feel happy at school.
• 74% of parents said their child's school place did not fully meet their needs. That has almost doubled since 2017.
• 70% of autistic pupils said school would be better if more teachers understood autism.
• 54% said having teachers who do not understand them is the worst thing about school.
• 54% said they do not have a quiet place to go to.
• Only 53% said they have someone to go to if there is a problem.

That is the NAS's education report summarising the same data, and it also notes that autistic pupils are more than twice as likely to be excluded as pupils without special educational needs. In the 2022 to 2023 school year, 31.1% of autistic pupils were persistent absentees compared with 20.7% of all pupils.

Those numbers are not about kids who do not want to learn. They are about kids who cannot cope with the place the learning is delivered in.

Here is how that looked from where I was sitting.

The environment is loud, bright, and unpredictable. A school corridor between lessons is about as hostile a sensory environment as you can design. Noise, crowds, smells, being bumped into, bells. By the time a lesson started I had often already spent a lot of my energy just getting there. Then I was expected to concentrate.

The rules are mostly unwritten. The official rules were fine. It was the hidden ones that got me: how to talk to a teacher, when a joke was allowed, who you could sit with, what counted as rude. Other kids absorbed that by osmosis. I had to work it out consciously, and I got it wrong often enough to be punished for it.

Learning is bundled with socialising. Group work, pair work, "turn to your neighbour and discuss". For an autistic kid, the social part is often the hardest part, and it is not marked, but it decides whether the lesson goes well. I wrote about the other side of this in my post on bullying and social anxiety. When you are being targeted by the people you are meant to learn alongside, you are not learning. You are surviving.

Masking is exhausting and invisible. Many autistic pupils hide or control their natural behaviour to blend in. The NAS says that masking can make staff think a pupil is coping well when inside they feel overwhelmed, and that it is linked to stress, exhaustion, and mental health problems. A quiet, compliant kid gets read as fine. Then the exhaustion shows up later, at home, or years after.

Interests are not allowed to be the way in. Autistic brains often learn deeply and fast when something is genuinely interesting, and badly when it is not. School has a fixed menu and a fixed pace. If the topic was not something I could connect to, I could not just push through on willpower the way I was told to. And when I was interested in something, there was no room to follow it.

Support is gated behind a fight. The NAS found that more than one in four parents waited over three years to get support for their child. By the time anything is in place, the school years are mostly gone.

Different gets treated as defiance. Not wanting to do something, not being able to do something, and not being able to explain why you cannot do something all look the same from the front of the room. I was not trying to be difficult. I did not have the words, and nobody went looking for them.

The cost does not end at 16 or 18#

The gap does not close when you leave.

I was not taught how to cope, I was taught how to comply. Those are different skills. Compliance gets you through a school day. It does not tell you what to do when nobody is setting the structure and you have to build your own.

The adult picture for autistic people in the UK is not great either. House of Commons Library figures show that in 2024/25 only 34.0% of disabled people with autism were in employment, against 55.3% of all disabled people and 82.0% of non-disabled people. The National Autistic Society says 77% of unemployed autistic people want to work. That is not a motivation problem. A lot of those people went through a school system that told them they were a bad fit, and then walked into a job market built the same way.

I do not want to put all of that on school. But it is hard to look at a system that is unhappy-making for three quarters of autistic pupils and not ask what it is preparing them for.

What I did learn, and when#

I did learn. That is the thing I most want people to hear.

It was after school, when I could choose what to learn, in what order, and how. I taught myself things on a computer, at my own pace, because I wanted to know them. I could go deep on something for hours without a bell cutting it off. I could pause, look something up, come back. I could make mistakes in private and fix them. Almost everything I rely on professionally now came from that, not from a classroom.

That told me something. The problem was never that I could not learn. The problem was that I could not learn in the way I was being made to.

What I would change#

I am not an education expert, and I do not have a full policy. But here is what I wish had been true:

• Teach the boring adult basics properly. Money, tax, renting, contracts, cooking, mental health. Make it statutory everywhere, inspect it, and give it real time. Thirty hours would have been more useful than most of what I sat through.
• Train teachers to understand autism, properly. Not a half day. The NAS found only 39% of teachers surveyed had received more than half a day of autism training. More than half of autistic pupils say teachers not understanding them is the worst thing about school.
• Give every pupil a quiet place and a person to go to. This should not be a special favour.
• Stop treating masking as good behaviour. A quiet kid who is holding it together is not the same as a kid who is okay.
• Let more than one kind of mind show what it can do. Coursework, projects, practical work, following an interest. Not everyone's best work happens in a silent hall with a clock on the wall.
• Tell kids it is not their fault. If a kid is struggling in an environment that was not built for them, the first thing they need to hear is that the environment has a problem, not them.

If you hated it too#

If you hated school, and you are autistic, or you suspect you might be, I want to say this.

It was not you being lazy. It was not you being stupid. It was not you being dramatic. You were doing something very hard, for years, without the right support, and mostly without anyone noticing how hard it was.

Whatever you could not do there does not set the ceiling on what you can do now. For me, the learning started when I got to choose. I hope it does for you too.

References#

• National Autistic Society, School Report 2021
• National Autistic Society, Education Report 2023
• National Autistic Society, A Constant Fight: Parliamentary Report
• National Autistic Society, What can my autistic child get support with at school? (masking)
• House of Lords Library, Financial education in schools
• Money and Pensions Service, Less than half of UK children have been taught about money
• Money and Pensions Service, Hundreds of thousands of young people leaving school every year without money skills
• House of Commons Education Committee, Delivering effective financial education
• House of Commons Library, Autism policy and services: Employment