“Although building students' skills for cooperation and contribution are the most important for future success in life, we often have to teach content at the expense of these skills”: Teachers’ perceptions of teaching autistic students using creative arts-based pedagogy in the mainstream secondary classroom.

Explorations of teachers' perceptions of using creative arts-based pedagogy (CABP) to teach autistic students in mainstream secondary schools are limited. As teachers are key stakeholders with direct experience of what does and does not work in educational contexts, their perspectives have value. This article reports on a qualitative questionnaire study exploring teachers’ perceptions of CABP with autistic students in mainstream secondary schools; 58 open-text questionnaire responses were included in an inductive content analysis. Teachers perceived CABP to offer a ‘safe space’ to autistic students in mainstream secondary schools in England. They perceived both risks and benefits, but mainly benefits to autistic students’ personal development when using CABP. However, these perceptions appear to be somewhat grounded in ableism, and do not necessarily consider the complexities of providing a wholly safe space for autistic students in school. Teachers also identified a number of teacher-associated, student-associated and teaching- and learning-associated barriers and facilitators to implementing CABP in a mainstream secondary school context with autistic students. The majority of barriers were infrastructural, including time, funding, resources, support, evidence & experience.