In the old Wiltshire milltown of Calne, there is an autism specialist school called the Springfields Academy. About 250 children and young people between the age of four and 19 go there. Class sizes are no larger than 12. In each room, every child has their own dedicated table. There are no end of seating options, described by the headteacher, Nicola Whitcombe, as “wobble stools, wobble cushions, ball chairs, standing desks and booths”, with “pods” elsewhere for one-to-one teaching. And across a broad, multi-level curriculum based around personal development, every lesson follows the same basic structure. “From an autistic perspective,” she says, “that’s really important: ‘I know I’m going into the same thing, so therefore I feel safe.’”

Every year the school takes in a lot of primary school leavers who would find a mainstream secondary pretty much impossible. “If you’ve got five different lessons in a day, in five different classrooms with five different teachers, and this before we’ve talked about the corridors, and the smells, and where you have lunch – it’s overwhelming,” Whitcombe said. “So at our school, we have to get our environment right.” Over the past six years, no one who has been to Springfields has begun post-school life as a Neet (not in education, employment or training) – which is quite some achievement.

Back in 2020, amid the chaos sown by the pandemic, my son James began his first day at another of the West Country’s state autism schools, 13 miles from where we live. From its small class sizes to soothingly curved walls – not to mention the calm expertise of many of the staff – it was a thoroughly modern place, offering inspired answers to what is now known about the needs of autistic people. Within months, he had made his third proper friend and had played a set of Beatles songs to an appreciative crowd of kids gathered outside their classrooms on an idyllic spring afternoon: Yellow Submarine, unsurprisingly, was the........

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