The second timetable

There is a timetable on the wall of every classroom in the country. Subject, room, teacher, period. It is printed, laminated in the good schools, and it is a genuine attempt to tell a child what is going to happen to them today.

And then there is the other one.

The second timetable is not written down anywhere. It lives in the heads of about four adults and one child. It says that Ms M is on yard duty on Tuesdays and she is the one who notices. It says the small corridor by the art room is quiet at eleven, but not at half eleven, because that is when the fifth years come through. It says that if you go to the office and stand near the photocopier, someone will find you a job to do and not ask you why you are not in French. It says that the SNA who knows about the noise is on the corridor Monday to Wednesday and after that you are on your own.

Every autistic child I have ever met in an Irish school is running on that second timetable. Most of their parents know it exists. Almost none of it has ever been written into a support plan.

Why we let it happen

I want to be careful here, because the second timetable is not a scandal. It is, mostly, people being kind.

It exists because a teacher noticed something and did something about it, quietly, without asking whether it was her job. It exists because an SNA worked out over four months what actually helps and then just kept doing it. It exists because the school secretary decided that a child standing in the office at eleven o'clock was not a discipline matter. It is the accumulated goodwill of adults who were given no system and built one anyway, out of nothing, in the cracks of a day that was already too full.

That is genuinely lovely. It is also the most fragile thing in the building.

Because none of it is written down, none of it survives contact with an ordinary change. The teacher goes on maternity leave. The SNA is reallocated in September because the allocation model says so. The art room corridor gets rescheduled. A substitute arrives on a Tuesday knowing nothing, and by eleven o'clock a child is in the office being asked why he is not in French, and the answer he gives — nothing, or a shrug, or something rude — goes on a record.

Nobody did anything wrong. The system simply had no memory, because we never asked it to have one.

What this week made visible

From today, teachers across the North are working their contracted hours and no more. Five unions, acting together, after a workload review was accepted and then not delivered.

I went and read what is being withdrawn. Replies to email and messages outside directed time. Extra-curricular activity, voluntary only. Meetings beyond one a term. Planning and preparation time that can no longer be quietly absorbed by supervision and admin.

Read that list again slowly and you are reading the second timetable being switched off.

I do not say that as a criticism of teachers. I say it as the clearest demonstration I have seen in years of something I have been arguing for a long time: when inclusion depends on unpaid goodwill, it is not a policy. It is a favour. And a favour can be withdrawn, entirely legitimately, by people who have been asked for too many of them for too long.

The parents will feel it first. The children will feel it hardest. And the teachers, who have been holding the whole arrangement together at their own expense, will be blamed for noticing that it was never theirs to hold.

Writing the second timetable down

So here is the practical thing, and it is not expensive.

Ask the child, or the parent, or the SNA, what actually works now. Not what the plan says. What actually works. Which corridor. Which adult. Which fifteen minutes of the day are the hard ones. Where do you go when it is too much, and who knows you go there.

Then write it into the official document. Not as a favour granted to one child, but as a designed feature of the room: a named quiet space with hours on it, a named adult with a named alternate, a route through the building that exists whether or not the person who invented it is in work on Tuesday.

That is all universal design for learning is, at the level of a corridor. It is the refusal to let access depend on one person's memory. It is looking at the thing the kind teacher invented and saying: that is good, that is now how we do it, and it will still be here in March when she is not.

The Irish system was never built for this range of need. What we have is a softened version of an older, narrower model — the hard edges sanded off, the underlying assumption left exactly where it was: that there is a normal learner, and everyone else is an adjustment somebody has to remember to make. You cannot sand your way out of that. You have to write the second timetable into the first one.

Change the environment, not the child.

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.