“A good transition is just key”: the views and experiences of disability support staff in supporting autistic students transition to university

The people who run the support service name the barrier themselves: the system relies too much on students asking for what they need.

Davies, J. & Bagnall, C. L. (2024). “A good transition is just key”: the views and experiences of disability support staff in supporting autistic students transition to university. Autism in Adulthood, 7(2), 155–170.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1089/aut.2024.0076

Checked

Against the abstract, 16 September 2026

Why it is on the list

Semi-structured interviews with 11 disability support staff at seven UK universities, analysed by content analysis and reflexive thematic analysis. Staff described the transition to university as an ongoing process rather than an event, and reported offering both academic supports such as in-class adjustments and non-academic ones such as social groups. They also acknowledged barriers to providing comprehensive support, including lacking resources and relying on students to self-advocate their needs — put plainly in the paper’s own accessible summary, that they “relied too much on students asking for what they need”. Their recommendations came out as three themes: comprehensive preparation and sustained support, better communication between stakeholders, and an accessible, inclusive university culture, with universal design named as a way to reduce the pressure on individual services.

Week 8’s premise is that the university specifies everything except how to ask for help. This is that premise stated from inside the institution, by the staff who run the service. It also supplies the week’s necessary counterweight: the fix these staff recommend is not better self-advocacy but a culture where fewer individual adjustments are needed. So the week teaches the email and says whose job this shouldn’t be. The authors note their own limitation — staff perspectives only, and that talking to autistic students directly would give a fuller picture.