Conference Program

Social skills training (SST) programmes have traditionally been delivered to autistic adolescents in clinical settings, framing social difficulties as individual deficits requiring remediation. The neurodiversity paradigm challenges this assumption, reframing cognitive differences as natural human variation and calling for a “coexistence of differences” rather than assimilation into normative standards (Singer, 1999; Acanfora, 2022). Drawing on Neurodiversity Pedagogy (Cadavero & Salerni, 2022) and Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2024), this paper asks what happens when a structured SST protocol designed for autistic adolescents is recontextualised as universal socio-emotional education for an entire school population — and what institutional conditions support or hinder this shift, now endorsed by Italian Law No. 22/2025 on non-cognitive and transversal skills in schools.

The project “Socio-Emotional Literacy at School” (Alfabetizzazione socio-emotiva a scuola), co-funded by Associazione Spazio Asperger ONLUS and Fondazione Varrone, applied the STARC protocol (Social Training and Affective Regulation Curriculum), developed by CuoreMenteLab and grounded in the PEERS programme (Laugeson & Frankel, 2010) and Cognitive Affective Education (Attwood, 2004), to the entire student body of a lower secondary school in central Italy. Following earlier Italian work transposing clinical autism protocols into mainstream education (Agrillo, Zappalà & Aiello, 2019), around 150 students (aged 10–14) from a heterogeneous, non-screened school cohort participated regardless of diagnostic status. The protocol comprised 32 weekly two-hour sessions on conversational skills, non-verbal communication, affective regulation, and bullying management. Teaching staff received concurrent training in cognitive-behavioural social coaching.

Methodologically, the study adopts an exploratory single-case design (Yin, 2018), treating the project as a bounded case of protocol transposition from clinical to educational setting. The case is analysed through triangulation of three data sources: (1) a quantitative baseline collected from 82 students and 68 parents using validated measures of social knowledge (TAASK-R), social self-statements (SISST), social responsiveness (SRS-2), emotional distress (DASS-21), and socialisation quality (QSQ); (2) practitioner field notes on implementation processes and barriers; and (3) institutional correspondence documenting the school–research relationship. Post-intervention data collection was largely prevented by the school’s failure to facilitate follow-up: no student post-test data and only 11 parent questionnaires were obtained. The paper, therefore, does not claim programme effectiveness but uses the case to analyse the conditions and limits of universalising a neurodiversity-informed protocol.

The case yields three analytic insights. First, the baseline offers a descriptive profile of socio-emotional functioning in a non-clinical school cohort through instruments usually confined to clinical research. Second, making the hidden curriculum of social interaction explicit for all students repositions socio-emotional learning as a universal educational entitlement rather than a compensatory service for a few, a matter of educational equity and de-stigmatisation. Third, implementation data reveal the institutional fragility of this shift: oversized groups, uneven teacher engagement, and the collapse of agreed research procedures constrained both pedagogical continuity and evaluative rigour. The paper argues that the value of neurodiversity-informed social learning lies not in normalising individual students but in transforming the peer environment, with implications for inclusive pedagogy, school–research partnerships, and socio-emotional literacy as a question of social justice.