Dr. Orla Dunne

Like that would be very frustrating.

And, you know, you might feel, as I say, like unmotivated.

And sometimes we can even see students who just maybe stop trying as much or even start acting out.

Yes, absolutely we do.

Yeah.

So for a lot of those students, when they're coming to us, you know, to be honest, they're so thrilled to be in a classroom where they can talk about a subject that they're really interested in at length and where they can have access to that advanced material.

that it can really make a massive difference.

And particularly for, say, our secondary school residential programme, we would have a lot of supports in place for young people with particularly autism who are coming to us who might be kind of away from home for the first time, might need a little bit of extra help with certain executive functioning tasks.

And we have a whole team in place for that.

And the biggest thing for us is that we're just really always trying to champion these students and push them forward.

And if they say they're really interested in one topic, that's perfect.

We'll find a way for them to explore that.

Oh, absolutely.

We would see that regularly that they, you know, a student could be very, very strong in maths, but perhaps just maybe not as great on their English.

And what we would like to see is them to be encouraged to go a bit further with their maths if they're able to do that, rather than to be held back in order to say, bring the other subject up to an average.

I did, yes.

I attended from when I was 13 up to 17.

I did the secondary school programme.

I studied like Mandarin Chinese, philosophy, journalism and history.

And I really loved it.