Educational and Vocational Disengagement of Young Adults with a Special Education Need and Autism in the United Kingdom

Background: Successful transition to adulthood poses a great obstacle for many young people with special education needs (SEN) and autism. Compared with the general population, autistic people are over twice as likely to be ‘not in employment, education or training’ (NEET). Being NEET has wide-ranging implications from poor mental health and suicidal ideation to economic viability and independence. It is known that SEN status and autism are themselves risk factors for disengagement. However, little is known about what social and educational vulnerabilities are linked to NEET outcome in the SEN and autistic population.

Objectives: Using data compiled by the UK government, the current study aims to explore how autism and other special education needs are linked to educational and occupational disengagement, taking into account additional factors relating to educational and social vulnerabilities.

Methods: All data originated from the National Pupil Database, obtained by permission of the Department for Education. The database contains information about school-aged children in state-funded schools across the UK. For this analysis, the National Client Caseload Information from 2016 (N= 2,289,792) was used to identify pupils who have become NEET. Using unique pupil identification numbers, we linked this data to the School Census for the preceding academic year 2014-2015 (N= 7,845,011) to obtain information on demographic variables (age, gender, first language, ethnicity) as well as the official SEN status of students (Autism, Other SEN category, No SEN). To account for further social and educational vulnerabilities we also linked social service records and records on school absences and exclusions. Logistic regression was used with NEET as the binary outcome to determine the odds of disengagement depending on SEN category (Autism, Other SEN category, No SEN).

Results: After controlling for demographic variables and social-educational vulnerabilities, autistic young people were significantly more likely to be NEET compared to young adults with no SEN (odds ratio = 1.23, 95% CI 1.04-1.44). Young people with other SENs were also significantly more likely to be NEET compared to young people with no SEN (odds ratio =1.87, 95% CI 1.79-1.96). Statistical comparison of coefficients revealed that the effect of having a SEN other than autism was significantly greater than the effect of having a diagnosis of autism alone in terms of becoming NEET (χ² = 25.04, p<0.000).

Conclusions: After adjusting for the effect of demographic variables and social-educational vulnerabilities, we found that a diagnosis of either autism or another SEN significantly increases the odds of becoming NEET, indicating that SEN status independently increases the likelihood of educational and vocational disengagement in the UK. We also found that having autism is less strongly associated with NEET outcome compared to having a different SEN. A limitation of this study is that it only includes pupils from state-funded schools, therefore it does not account for certain segments of the population. Future work will examine how each major SEN sub-type is linked to NEET outcome and how social-educational vulnerabilities mediate disengagement across these groups.