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Stop the Lamination: Change from the Bottom Up

Oct 8

4 min read

I was listening to The Rest Is Politics this week. The conversation, as I heard it, was about the theatre of international politics: big figures making threats and promises on the world stage, and how much of that performance gets in the way of the actual work of politics. And then the turn that stayed with me. Real change, they said, rarely starts at the top. It starts with the people involved. The people affected.

I couldn't stop thinking about the laminator.

What the laminator does

Readers of our comic will know The Laminator, the hero machine whose lamination "ensures everyone is included". He is very busy. He laminates strategies, action plans, policies, posters and promises. He laminates them beautifully. They will still be on the wall in 2040.

But here is the thing about a laminator. It does exactly what it is fed. Feed it material to tick boxes, and it will produce shiny, durable, ticked boxes. Nothing more. It has no idea whether the child in the corridor got through the day.

Now imagine the same machine plugged in by someone whose life depends on it working. A parent who has sat in their car outside a school at 11.20. An autistic teenager who knows exactly which bell, which light and which corridor ends their day. An SNA who has watched the same child miss the same lesson for a year. They don't stop at laminating. They keep going until the thing on the wall is the thing that happens in the room.

That is the difference between a box being ticked and a life being changed. And in that difference lies the real opportunity for autism services in Ireland.

The government should... and then what?

I have written plenty of sentences that begin "the government should". I'll write more. Tomorrow is Budget Day, and the promises will be announced, and some of them will matter. Holding the State to account is not optional, and I'm not giving it up.

But I have also watched what happens when that is the only sentence we have. We wait. We wait for the strategy, then for the implementation plan, then for the review of the implementation plan. Waiting becomes the work. And a lot of children grow up while the lamination dries.

So I want to add a second sentence, and put it first: what can I do? What can we do, here, this week, with the people in the room?

What bottom-up looks like

Bottom-up change is not a slogan. It is small, specific and stubborn. A few places it starts:

In the classroom: ask the learner. Let a child or young person write, draw or say their own one-page profile: what helps, what hurts, what they're good at. It will be more accurate than any report written about them.
In the school: walk the building with the pupils who find it hardest. The noisy corridor, the bright hall, the queue at the canteen. Fix one thing. Then the next.
Among parents: find the two or three other families who know what you know. Map what actually exists locally, write it down, share it. A parent-made map has helped more families than many official directories.
With autistic adults: bring them into the design from the start, not the consultation at the end. Pay them for their expertise. Nothing about us without us is not a poster. It is a method.
At work: use the rights you have, ask for flexibility in writing, and when you get it, say so out loud. Every parent who gets a yes makes the next yes easier.
In the community: turn up to the local meetings where decisions about services, buildings and budgets are made, and bring one concrete ask.

None of these need a new strategy. All of them change something by Friday.

Insist on the how

There is one more thing the people affected can do that nobody else can. We can insist on how it's done.

Not just more services, but services designed with the people who use them. Not just more places, but places where children can stay. Not just a policy, but a named person, a date and a way for families to see whether it happened. When the people whose lives depend on the outcome are the ones holding the plug, the machine works differently.