The best day of the year

The letter comes home in the bottom of the bag, folded twice, at the end of September. The tour is on a Friday in October. The bus leaves at half eight, back by six, twenty-five euro, bring a packed lunch, sign the bottom and return it by Wednesday.

It is the best day of the year. Everyone says so, and everyone is right. It is also the only day in the school calendar that comes with no plan for him at all.

What the day actually is

Think about what a school tour removes.

It removes the timetable, which is the one document in the building that tells him what happens next. It removes his room, his desk, his place in the line. It removes the bell, which he does not like but can predict. It removes his own teacher and replaces her with whichever four teachers volunteered. It removes the two toilets he knows are usually quiet. It removes the route home.

Then it adds a bus for ninety minutes each way, a car park, a queue, a guide with a microphone, forty minutes of free time in a place he has never been, and lunch on a wall with whoever he happens to be standing beside at one o'clock.

I have written here before that the yard is not a rest, it is the hardest class on the timetable, scheduled twice. The tour is the yard. For six hours. In a town he has never been to. With no bell to end it.

Nothing on that list is a cruelty. Most of it is the point. That is exactly the difficulty: the thing that makes the day wonderful for twenty-seven children is the one thing that makes it unsurvivable for the twenty-eighth — nothing is where he left it.

Nobody meant this

A school tour is one of the best things a school does, and it runs almost entirely on goodwill.

Somebody rang three coach companies and did the risk assessment. Somebody collected twenty-five euro from twenty-eight children in envelopes, chased the four who forgot, and kept the float in a drawer. Four teachers gave up a Friday and took on the legal responsibility for other people's children on a motorway, for nothing.

Nobody involved in that is being careless. They are doing a hard, unpaid job that the school could not run without them.

But here is the structural fact underneath it: a day that runs on goodwill has no plan, because goodwill cannot be rostered, costed or audited. There is a spreadsheet for the money and a form for the insurance. There is no document anywhere that says what happens to the child for whom the removal of structure is the risk.

The word that does the work

The word is optional.

The tour is optional. The match is optional. The Christmas concert, the non-uniform day, the sports day, the fundraiser walk — all optional. And optional is the word that lifts the whole day off the books.

Because provision was never promised for an optional day, a child not being able to take part in it cannot register as a failure of provision. Nothing is breached. No box goes unticked. The student support file is not wrong, because it plans for the timetable, and the tour is not on the timetable.

So the access question quietly stops being a school question and becomes a family question. And once it is a family question, the answer a family reaches — we'll leave it this year — stops looking like an access failure and starts looking like a preference.

That is the diagnosis. We did not decide to exclude anybody from the best day of the year. We decided the day was voluntary, and a voluntary day has no owner.

My own two sides of it

I have been the teacher with the envelope of notes and the headcount at the car park gate. I have stood at the front of a bus with a list and been uncomplicatedly delighted by that day, because it is delightful.

I have also sat at the kitchen table with that same letter, doing sums that have nothing to do with twenty-five euro — ninety minutes on a bus, no idea which building, no idea where the quiet is, no idea who he sits beside — and come to the conclusion that the honest answer was no. Then written unfortunately he won't be able to go, which explains nothing and is read as a preference.

The letter did not get better because the person reading it had also sent it.

What it costs, person by person

The child. He does the arithmetic himself, before anybody has to say no to him. That is the part people miss. He is not told he cannot go; he works out that he cannot, and he withdraws early enough that it looks like a shrug. Then on Monday, twenty-seven children have a reference he is not in — the thing that happened on the bus, the thing the guide said, the photo. Not a lesson missed. A fortnight of conversation missed.

The teacher. She would plan for him. She has planned for him all year. But nobody told her that this day needed a plan, because the forms she filled in were about money and insurance, and neither has a field for this child will find eleven o'clock very hard. She finds out at eleven o'clock, in a car park, with twenty-seven other children to count.

The parent. She is asked a yes/no question that has no yes/no answer, and the one accommodation the system reliably offers is you could always come along yourself. Which converts a school day into a day of unpaid support work for her, and — for a twelve-year-old — is socially the single most expensive form of help available. There is no version of that reply slip where she comes out of it well.

The sibling. He is two years ahead in the same school, or he is at home, and either way the week bends. He knows by now not to be too visibly excited about his own tour.

What a designed version would look like

None of this needs money. It needs the day written down.

Put the trip on the support file. One line each: what happens at half eight, who he goes to if it goes wrong, where the quiet place is in that building, what lunch is and where, what time he is actually home. The checkable test is this — if he cannot be told the week before where he will sit on the bus and who he is eating lunch with, the trip has not been planned. It has been booked.

Send the itinerary to families, not only to the staff. Times, the name of the building, a photograph of the front of it. Multiple means of representation is not a principle for pages. It applies to a Friday.

Give the day a job, not just a free hour. Forty minutes of unstructured time in an unfamiliar place is the hardest instruction of the day. A named job and a named person to do it with costs nothing, and it is the difference between standing at the edge and being somewhere.

And then count. Not reasons, not notes — just names. Who did not go on the tour, the match, the concert, three years running. An optional day looks optional right up until you notice it is the same children opting out of it.

Two things this is not

This is not an argument against school tours. More of them, not fewer, and more sport and more concerts. The answer to a day a child cannot access is never to cancel the day.

And a well-planned Friday is not a substitute for anything real. It is not an SNA, not a school place, not the appointment still on a waiting list. A timetable for the bus does not fix a system short of people, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend a template is a solution.

The landing

We planned the coach, the tickets, the insurance, the float in the drawer and the permission slips. We planned every part of the day that could go wrong in a way a school would be held responsible for.

He did not opt out of the best day of the year. He looked for himself in the plan for it, could not find himself anywhere, and spared everybody the conversation.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.