Educational ideology and the autistic student: findings from a pilot study involving Q-sort methodology

This paper reflects upon the initial stages of a project being conducted at London South Bank University (LSBU) regarding mentoring for young adults who are on the autism spectrum, locating problematic issues with current guidance, before giving an overview of the proposed project and its methodology. Much guidance that has been written for preparing and supporting people on the autism spectrum in post-compulsory education has been done so from a clinician’s perspective (VanBergeijk et al. 2008, Gelbar et al. 2014). Where there are some possibly valuable insights in such accounts, they would be open to criticism by a number of autistic scholars and activists (Milton, 2012a, 2014). Upon review of current practice guidance, this project will offer an alternative to student mentoring guided by the Personal Construct Theory (PCT) of George Kelly (1955).