Autism experts and campaigners are calling for regulations to safeguard vulnerable children by controlling the use of “chill-out rooms” in schools.
Also called safe rooms or time-out rooms, they have been reportedly been used by some schools to effectively seclude or punish youngsters with autism. Simon Baron Cohen, professor at Cambridge University in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, said such practices risked giving children with autism a sense that they are “failures”.
The journal Autism Eye has reported on one school installing more than 12 chill-out rooms, as well as another with “an electric, prison-like door on its room and a school using a space likened to a broom cupboard as a chill-out room”. Autism Eye is running a campaign on the issue and Robert Buckland MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Autism (APPG), has described schools’ reliance on the rooms as “an admission of failure”, promising to raise the issue within the APPG.
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