My friend Sheila Coates, who has died from myeloma aged 67, was a pioneer in services for autistic children and their families in and around Oxfordshire. In the early 1970s, Sheila was asked by the head of St Andrew's primary school in Chinnor to work with an autistic boy who would otherwise have been excluded from his school. There soon followed two other boys, helped by two more teachers, and the model of working with autistic children in a mainstream school started to develop. I was researching autism at the time and we became collaborators and friends.
Sheila Matthews, born in Walmer, Kent, was head girl of Lewes county grammar school for girls (now Priory school) and trained as a history teacher. She then taught PE and games at Linton Village College in Cambridgeshire. She married Chris Coates and they had three sons, John, Ian and David.
Sheila's work in Oxfordshire became a key model for the 1978 Warnock report on integrating disabled children into mainstream schools, although unlike many post-Warnock attempts, Sheila integrated the children only as much as they and the host schools could happily manage. Paradoxically, the more successful her work was, the less visible it was, and this meant that battling for proper funding was often difficult.
It was amazing to many of us that Sheila could organise such a dispersed service (more than 90 staff in many host schools, working with more than 200 children) with such seemingly effortless grace and still find time to teach, do therapy, support families, and make up and sing funny songs for the Chinnor Christmas parties.
The philosophy which she engendered by her example lives on: respect and caring for each child and each family, combined with a realism about their difficulties, a willingness to explore new ideas; developing the service to address the daily reality of the children's problems; and giving staff freedom to develop their own initiatives.
Sheila is survived by Chris, their sons and three grandchildren, Millie, Daisie and Jude.