With the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children and young people were re-conceptualized as competent social actors and citizens, whose voices should be listened to. This global endorsement of children’s right to be included in decision-making in matters affecting their lives has since also been widely adopted by researchers and is reflected in the plethora of literature and theorizing on the topic as well as in the practice of doing research with children. A group that until recently has been invisible here are children with disabilities. Driven by a deficit discourse, having a disability has been implicitly assumed to imply impairment and, thus, incompetency and incapacity as regards participating in research (Curran and Runswick-Cole 2014), rendering children with disabilities unvalued research participants (Cocks 2008). Parents’ and teachers’ perspectives were taken as a proxy for disabled children’s perspectives, leaving children with disabilities unheard in the research (Stafford 2017).

The past decade, however, has seen an extension of this autonomy to the disabled child – a development that recognises the potential of the child with disabilities to make valid and valuable contributions in all aspects of life (e.g., Twomey and Carroll 2018). Spurring this change is the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006). While disabled children’s voices are gaining visibility in the research (Rannveig 2015), we know little about whose voices are being included.

The focus of this presentation is on two disabilities: autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Diagnostic rates for both these groups have seen a rapid increase in the last decades (Russell et al. 2022; Rydell et al. 2018). They have also both been central in school debates focussing on the challenges to inclusion and participation, particularly in the Global North (Pellicano, Bölte, and Stahmer 2018). Students with these diagnoses have been shown to perform worse academically, have higher rates of school dropout and lower levels of education than their non-disabled peers (Kent et al. 2011). Despite the fact that the number of children diagnosed with autism and ADHD is increasing and that research has highlighted the difficulties encountered by this group in school, many argue that they have been given limited opportunities to express their views about their own experiences of school (Humphrey and Parkinson 2006; Taneja Johansson 2021).

The purpose of the present scoping review is to critically examine empirical research that draws on the first-person school experiences of students with autism and ADHD as well as to map whose voices are being heard and where the current knowledge gaps are. More specifically, it aims to analyse the key characteristics of this body of research in relation to the publication context and research methodology. The following research questions are examined: 1) What type of journal is the article published in?; 2) Where is the research situated geographically?; 3) What sampling routes are used?; 4) What are the characteristics of participants are included in the research, specifically regarding disability type, school year, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background?; 5) Which qualitative research designs and methods are used in the studies?

The intention of the present scoping review is not to provide a description of the summative research findings or to assess the quality of the studies in the field, but instead to identify which voices are being foregrounded in the research, the goal being to try to understand the sources of the current knowledge base and determine directions for future research (Pham et al., 2014).

Studies were identified through a systematic scoping review of research published between January 2000 to December 2021 in four electronic databases and a subsequent ancestry search to locate articles missed in the database search. Scoping reviews are a useful tool for effectively mapping how research on a certain topic has been designed and conducted (Munn et al. 2018) and was applied in the present study to assist in identification of certain characteristics in the articles and their mapping, reporting and discussion. Development of the protocol for the review was guided by the procedure outlined in the Joanna Briggs Institute Reviewers Manual (Peters, Godfrey, and McInerney 2017). A search strategy was developed and Key search terms were identified by the author using the PICo framework – population, the phenomenon of interest and the context (Lockwood, Munn, and Porritt 2015). All searches included at least one identifier for autism or ADHD (e.g., autism, Asperger’s), linked to at least one identifier for perspective (e.g., view, experience), and one for context (e.g., school, education). The key search terms were developed through an iterative process. The databases were selected for their relevance to the purpose of the present scoping review, which had a clear focus on the school setting. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were created to guide assessment of an article’s relevance to the topic of the present review. An article had to meet the following criteria to be included in the final dataset: a) an empirical study, b) at least 50% of the sample were people with autism and/or ADHD, c) a research focus on school or school-age children, d) inclusion of first-person perspectives, experiences, narratives or views on school-related issues, and e) use of a qualitative data collection method with people with autism and/or ADHD. The studies that met the inclusion criteria were then systematically mapped and analysed. This was a two-step process. Step 1 involved extraction of the information as provided by the author, and Step 2 coding of that information based on a pre-determined classification or conventional content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon 2005). A data extraction sheet was developed to chart information on the following main categories: 1) descriptive characteristics of the study, 2) sample-related characteristics, and 3) method-related characteristics.

Fifty-eight articles met the inclusion criteria. The results show an increase in including first-person experiences of school in educational research in the last six years. The autism voice dominated over ADHD and was strongly skewed towards the academically able group. There was an overrepresentation of boys and secondary school children across the studies. Characteristics such as the child’s social class, ethnicity and socioeconomic background were largely neglected, with diagnosis-related events being foregrounded. Interviewing was the main method used, and student perspectives were often accompanied by other data sources. The presentation concludes with a discussion on the silencing of already marginalized sub-groups and the ethical responsibility we as researchers have in relation to the knowledge we create, the discourse that it perpetuates and the stereotypes it reinforces

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