Girls with Autism

Girls with Autism, ITV, review: 'compelling'

This documentary about Britain's only state-run school for girls with autism was sweet and scrupulous, says Iona McLaren

By Iona McLaren11:45PM BST 15 Jul 2015

The most common misconception about autism is that girls don’t have it.
Perhaps Girls with Autism did a certain amount of mythbusting just by showing up in the television listings.

On air, this superb documentary fulfilled that promise and more. But to say it was only “mythbusting” would be faint praise. Our understanding of autism tends to be so basic – loose notions drawn from the particular types, humourless and intense, portrayed in Rain Man or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – that even a bad documentary could be mythbusting. Girls with Autism was better: mesmeric, sensitive and extremely amusing.

A camera crew followed life at Limpsfield Grange in Surrey, the only state school specialising in girls with autism. All the girls there are weekly boarders, some being driven hundreds of miles each weekend to go back home. The documentary focused on three pupils with autism, but otherwise little in common: Abi, Beth and Katie.

Abi was the most obviously unusual: a selective mute who would speak at home but remained silent at school, a rictus grin on her cherubic face, panic in her eyes. She hid in dark rooms to avoid her lessons.

Fourteen-year-old Beth, however, looked a normal teenager, with Titian hair and eyeliner. She had been in a mainstream school until anxiety had made her suicidal. Determined not to settle at Limpsfield Grange (where one student wiggled her hands like octopus tentacles as she went around corners), Beth protested her normality: “The girls here are weird and wacky, and it’s hard.”

Katie, the comic heroine of the piece, seemed a gregarious, pretty 16-year-old. But one clue was the ear defenders: Asperger’s Syndrome made her detest sudden noises. More distinctively, Katie was obsessed with boys, to a degree that television perhaps has not seen before. On her iPad, she would pore over pictures of her latest, unwitting beloved – her parents found one image duplicated 1,160 times. “We can’t let her out of our sight, really,” they said. “It’s worrying.” Her guileless boyfriend-hunting at the Christmas disco made deeply compelling television.

To keep such taxing girls on their various learning curves required patience and gymnastic improvisation from their teachers, who were ready to sit on the swings or walk the school Labrador with their pupils – even in lesson time – if it would help. Limpsfield Grange is an Ofsted Outstanding school, and you could see why. The film was scrupulous in furnishing their side of the story as well as the pupils’ and the parents’.

Despite what one mother thought, autism cannot be cured; but the isolation and anxiety can be handled. Abi finally befriended another pupil, to whom she would talk. “Perhaps one day our imaginary friends can meet?” chirped Abi. “Yes!” said her new pal. “Maybe tomorrow?”