“Nobody wanted to take the child”: Bavarian parents’ experiences of barriers and enabling conditions in the education of autistic children

Purpose Despite formal inclusion mandates, autistic children in stratified educational systems continue to face systematic barriers to meaningful school participation. This study aims to examine how parents of autistic children in Bavaria, Germany, experience these barriers and what conditions, when present, make a difference. Design/methodology/approach Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021) of 492 free-text survey responses from 529 Bavarian parents, integrating accounts collected at school entry and across the broader educational trajectory. Analysis was supported by MAXQDA Analytics Pro. Findings Six themes emerged: systematic school rejection and structural mismatch; educational outcomes as a lottery of the individual teacher; the school aide as institutional gatekeeper; compounding parental advocacy burden; the child behind the data; and enabling conditions alongside calls for systemic reform. Across all themes, a consistent pattern emerges: families do not merely experience institutional failure; they absorb it, compensating through sustained advocacy labour for what schools do not provide. Research limitations/implications Findings reflect parental perspectives; the voices of autistic children themselves remain absent and constitute a priority for future research. The structural conditions enabling meaningful inclusion are identifiable and reproducible; the question is whether systems choose to make them the rule rather than the exception. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study offers one of the first systematic qualitative accounts of parental experiences across the full educational trajectory in a highly stratified school system. It reframes parental advocacy not as individual resilience but as structural compensation for institutional inadequacy, a distinction with direct consequences for inclusive education policy.