Behind the Mask Conferences and Workshops

These Conferences explore Autistic Girls’ Experience of School. Appeer are honoured to have been part of these ground breaking events.

The first Autism and Girls Conference, ‘Behind the Mask’ was hosted by Jane Gupta, All Age Autism Strategy Lead for Surrey County Council, and the Lucy Rayner Foundation and took place in February 2023. The latest Behind the Mask Conference took place in November 2023.  The conferences were for Surrey headteachers, senior leadership staff, Sencos and SEND teachers.  The aim was to enhance school staffs' understanding of autistic girls’ experiences at school and introduce appropriate support strategies.

Prior to the Conferences autistic girls, teens, parents/carers (and those assigned female at birth) from the Appeer Community created a vibrant collection of artwork expressing their experience of masking to fit in, or just get through the school day. An exhibition of this work opened each conference along with a powerful presentation by Jo Dilworth, our founder and CEO, and some brave young people from our Appeer Teen Group. Jo explained  to the audience how the mask artwork was created through a number of workshops with initial support from autistic artist Anna Farley. The project aimed to uncover the complexity of masking and of the female autistic experience. Jo said, “we were really moved by the strength of feeling shown by our artists. Some challenging feelings came up, as many autistic girls have been traumatised by difficult experiences in school. We’re humbled by their courage to share their experience with educators, to help them better understand and support autistic girls in school.”

The young people from Appeer also took to the podium to talk about their own artwork and explain how it reflected their experience of masking at school.  One 16 year old explained, “My artwork is inspired by the difficult situations I encounter due to my sensory issues and how, even though it may not be obvious to the people around me by looking at me from the outside, on the inside I could be in severe distress.”

Our young people also helped to develop and deliver an immersive workshop at the Conference entitled ‘A Day in the Life of an Autistic Girl at School’:  We asked the delegates to line up outside the "classroom" and made them wait in the corridor, we jostled them with big rucksacks as they entered the room, we made them to wear "school uniform" to be "ready to learn" (our uniform consisted of wet, woolly gloves with sand inside!). Our "teacher", kept adding unexpected changes to the lesson plan; she asked delegates to change seats mid way through the "lesson", made them read a passage from a book they had never seen before and experience "lunch" in a noisy, smelly room (yes, we even wafted boiled cabbage around the room!). One of the delegates said "I really wanted to leave after just 5 minutes, it's really made me think about what my autistic pupils feel during a lesson".

One of our staff members, Casey who is also autistic sat on a panel during the conference and answered questions from the audience of over 150 delegates.  She provided a strong authentic voice to the event.

We are super proud of our young people for so eloquently sharing their experiences of school and masking. This includes those who attended and spoke at the Conference, those who created artwork and those who contributed to the development of the workshop.