There is no such thing as SEND

I’ve been speaking and writing around this for years, but this is the first time I’ve sat with it properly and followed it all the way through.

SEND as a construct.
SEND as a workaround.
SEND as the mechanism that allows an education system that was never designed for all children to remain fundamentally unchanged, while appearing compassionate.

SEND is not a framework for inclusion, but an administrative construct created to manage difference without requiring the education system itself to change. A way of locating the problem in the child, while protecting the structure that excludes them.

In this piece, I explore how ‘support’ has become something children must qualify for, prove, and perform for, rather than something assumed as part of being human.

This isn’t about denying need, disability, or support. It’s about naming how need has been bureaucratised, pathologised, and made conditional within a system that has no meaningful interest in inclusion, because inclusion requires wholesale, structural change.

SEND isn’t a diagnosis, nor is it an identity. SEND is not something any child ‘has’. Children don’t arrive ‘with SEND’. It’s a label that tells us far more about the system using it than the child it’s applied to.

If you’re an educator, a parent, a professional, or someone who has ever watched a child become increasingly visible on paper while disappearing everywhere else, this may make you feel uncomfortable. That’s not accidental.

This isn’t an argument about individual educators or intent. It’s about structure, power, and the stories we keep telling ourselves about what inclusion looks like.

If SEND is real, then we should be able to defend it. And if we can’t, we need to be honest about what it’s actually doing.

***

“There is no such thing as SEND.”

Now there’s a statement that’s going to get a lot of backs up… but there is a very good reason for me saying this, and I need you to not clutch your pearls, panic, or click off and write me a strongly worded letter, just for a moment.

That’s right, step away from the keyboard… You too at the back there! I can see you you!

Just bear with me, as i explain what I mean.

I’m talking about SEND as in ‘Special Educational Needs and Disabilities’ and in the words of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride:

“You keep using this word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”

SEND is a construct.

It’s a convenient fiction. And it’s a neatly boxed label designed to solve a problem the education system created, and refuses to take responsibility for.

The term “SEND” (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) didn’t emerge fully formed in the UK. It evolved through a series of educational reforms that attempted to move away from overt segregation, while still preserving many of its underlying assumptions. Each phase of reform introduced new language, new structures, and new paperwork, but despite the progressive intent, what each phase never did was question the underlying issue of who education was for, what it’s purpose is, and on what terms is a child expected to engage with it. The core of educational practice remained largely unchanged.

Before 1978 children were categorised by perceived ‘defect’.

Labels such as “maladjusted,” “educationally sub-normal,” and “ineducable” justified exclusion from mainstream schools, with many children and young people sent to institutional settings, or denied formal education entirely. This system was not just selective, it was eugenic. An open triage system of segregation with little pretence of inclusion.

The Warnock Report of 1978 marked a rhetorical shift, recommending replacing deficit-based categories with the broader term “special educational needs,” proposing that any child might need support at some point. It introduced the idea of ‘statements’ to document needs, and promoted a more inclusive approach: educating children with, what were categorised as, additional needs in mainstream schools “wherever possible”.

The Education Act of 1981 gave legal weight to Warnock’s recommendations. For the first time, the notion of “special educational needs” was formally recognised in legislation. The Act required local authorities to identify and assess ‘children with SEN’ and to provide appropriate provision, ideally within mainstream settings.

The Children and Families Act 2014 introduced what was called the ‘SEND Code of Practice’. It merged education and disability into a single framework (SEND), did away with the older statements of support, and introduced Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), with an emphasis on the involvement of families in planning.

This essay is contained in my book, ‘Autism: A Collection of Essays‘ along with 15 other essays from my blog. Including a new introduction, preface and a Foreword from Dr Amy Pearson. Find out more here; Autism: A Collection of Essays

So, that’s a nice little history lesson, Kieran. So, where is the problem with all this?

Well…

While all this could be, and has been framed as progressive, retrospectively the model was problematic because the core structure of education as an exclusive system was, if anything, actually further codified. The creation of SEND positioned and then reinforced ‘support’ as an exception to the norm and something to be identified, labelled, and monitored, while keeping the ‘wonderful’ core British education system, completely untouched. Access to this system remained conditional on formal recognition, and the pathologisation of need became enshrined in law. While the language of EHCPs shifted to “co-production” and “person-centred planning,” the underlying model remained the same, with support as something allocated after sufficient evidence of need, rather than assumed as a right.

Which brings me back to my statement that there is no such thing as SEND. It is a construct, and that construct is a fallacy.

SEND isn’t some compassionate recognition of difference. It’s a workaround. A bureaucratic end-note to a story that was never meant to include everyone. An institutional whisper of, “Ah yes, this child doesn’t fit. Let’s name the child, not the structure, as the problem.” A way of completely avoiding the fact that the UK education system is, at heart, exclusive and accessible only to those who conform to it’s needs, not the other way around.

Support should exist. Of course it should. But not like this, SEND is not a welcome mat. It’s a reluctant concession.

And, just to be clear: there’s no such thing as a ‘SEND diagnosis’ either.

That phrase alone tells you how badly we’ve mangled the relationship between pathologisation, identity, support, and education, but we’ll get to that. Oh boy, are we going to get onto that.

If the label of SEND itself isn’t infantilising enough, they crowned it with the word “special.”

Look at you, with your special needs. Aren’t you a special ickle baby. How generous of us to include you, so long as you make it easy for us. So long as you’re grateful. So long as we get to define what support means and when you deserve it.

The notion of ‘special needs’ has for a long time been a focus of Disability rights campaigners when addressing the ableism and infantilisation of Disabled people by non-disabled people, particularly those in positions of power and authority. The notion of ‘special’ reinforces the idea of disabled people being somehow mysterious, magical, innocent and child-like, and therefore completely incompetent.

Yet ‘special needs’ in education is baked into law, policy, language and attitude.

‘SEND’ isn’t just a category, it’s a vocabulary of failure dressed up as care. A linguistic sleight of hand that turns systemic privilege and neglect into administrative compassion. No child’s needs are more special than another’s. The only thing special is the system’s refusal to change, and its determination to frame that refusal as the child’s burden. To name their difference to what the system wants and expects to see, not as part of the design, but as a disruption to be tolerated.

Grudgingly.

Temporarily.

On paper.

SEND wasn’t created for the children it is applied to. It was created for the system. And the sooner we name that, the sooner we can start tearing it down.

The System That Created SEND

To understand why SEND exists, you have to look at what it was built to patch over.

The British education system: this rigid, standardised, industrialised institution that has been modelled to countries all over the world, was never designed for everyone. It was designed to produce uniformity. To cultivate a very specific kind of child: still, quiet, receptive, obedient, conforming.

This 11 minute long animation from Sir Ken Robinson gives a fascinating insight into where our current education system began and how it has evolved over the years:

The education system we have in the UK wasn’t built to nurture difference. It was built to exclude and erase it.

It is a mechanism. A factory-line construct born out of colonial Empire and industrial capitalism, where the primary goal was never really learning, it was processing. Children grouped by age, moved through units of time, taught what someone else has deemed important, with a focus on literacy and numeracy in order to facilitate productivity in the workforce. Over time and on every level, more and more are filtered out until those who are left are the most-conformist, ‘academically able’, or somehow managed to survive. All the time measured by how closely they can imitate the expected form.

This is calibration, a eugenics of ‘education’, and any act of non-conformity in that process is disruptive. An act of sabotage.

SEND is how the system responded when moral good forced its design flaw to become too visible to ignore. But the moral good was enacted not with reflection, and definitely not with redesign, but with categorisation in order to keep the core system intact. Protecting the core, the cult, the myth of it’s perfection driven by the belief in it’s need. The needed reflection that it is a system that is fundamentally flawed, and therefore fundamentally harmful, is difficult for educators to face.

Why? Well, because they care.

I define Neurological Imperialism as the systemic imposition of neurotypical norms, values, and ways of being, positioning them as superior, universal, and inherently human; and also as the interpersonal assumption of experience, norms, values and ways of being as inherently neurotypical. It’s a form of cognitive colonisation that frames neurotypical experiences as the benchmark against which all other neurological experiences are judged, measured, and controlled.

In the case of the current education system, SEND becomes the imposition of a dominant cognitive standard under the guise of education. The system itself doesn’t just teach, it colonises. It enforces a particular way of thinking, being, behaving and learning as universal, then demands labels as justifications for everyone who can’t or won’t conform. This means that fundamentally, despite its inclusive intentions, SEND is not an inclusive measure, it’s just damage control dressed as inclusion. A soft-edged strategy to reframe systemic failure as individual dysfunction. It’s an act of exclusion written into law.

The success of this strategy relies on one thing: legibility.

The system must be able to name the child before it will help them. It needs them to fit into a category it understands, and not because it cares, but because unlabelled difference threatens the whole illusion of uniform progress. SEND doesn’t name need, it translates it into something the system can tolerate just enough to maintain order, not enough to demand change.

SEND pretends that there is a default child, a standard learner, and everyone else is “additional.” But there is no default child. There never has been, only the expectation of there being one: the model child who morphs into the model adult who is white, middle class, straight, male, non-disabled, Christian and academic. There is only a default system, which is one built around these narrow, ableist expectations. Any child who falls outside that design is flagged, filed, and forced to adapt.

The worst thing is the system doesn’t even try to hide it, it’s perversely proud of it!

The curriculum reflects white, Western, ‘Christian’, neurotypical values, it’s enforced timetable fragments attention and punishes immersion; it’s policies reward compliance and punish regulation. The architecture, the language, the rules, they are all built to suppress bodies, flatten expression, and enforce sameness. We celebrate difference by wearing the same clothes, learning the same things, in the same ways, answering the same questions with the same answers, by not expressing ourselves in any way, unless it’s a special day marked for such performative recognition, or a reward.

And then SEND (or ‘behaviour’) is the bandage slapped on when that suppression starts to show itself, when it boils out, seeps through the cracks in the veneer.

None of this can be fixed by good intentions alone. Teachers, SENCOs, support staff, they all care. I rarely meet an education professional who isn’t invested in the children they teach, that’s why they are there: they care and they love to impart knowledge, or enjoy knowledge being consumed. Many of them know the system is broken. Many of them bend rules, write furious emails, spend hours filling out forms for EHCPs that barely scratch the surface of what a child needs.

They’re not the problem.

But they are part of the problem, even complicit with it; tasked with enforcing a framework designed around surveillance and control. Even support becomes a form of soft containment, which is offered only once the child has been pathologised, monitored, and made legible. I explored many of those themes specifically in this article: “School Refusal or School-Induced Trauma? Rethinking EBSA, EBSNA, and the harm we call help“.

Reflecting on this, learning it, being confronted with it… That’s incredibly challenging, heartbreaking, traumatising – seeing it and recognising it is even more so. Knowing that you are part of the problem, that you actively perpetuate it, when that problem is the core of your identity as a person, as a professional.. well… that’s a distinctly uncomfortable thing to do, let alone to do anything about.

But we have to be honest and own the fact that SEND doesn’t exist to liberate, the opposite. It exists to manage. To preserve the structure while pretending to adapt, whispering: “We see you,” while simultaneously never making space for who the child actually is. So, when the system says a child has “special needs,” what it really means is: “They weren’t part of the plan.” And instead of writing a new plan, we invented a label to make them fit better into the old one.

The Language Trap

As I mentioned earlier: if SEND is a construct, then the phrase ‘SEND diagnosis’ is its favourite lie.

A diagnosis of SEND sounds official, doesn’t it? Clinical, even. As if somewhere in the DSM there’s a tidy entry that says ‘SEND’, complete with criteria and treatment pathways.

There isn’t. There never has been, and there never will be. Because SEND isn’t a ‘condition’ and it’s not a diagnosis. It’s a dehumanising, bureaucratic label created by an education system desperate to make difference manageable.

And yet, the phrase ‘SEND diagnosis’ is everywhere:

Teachers use it.
SENCOs use it.
It turns up in training.
In EHCP documentation.
In conversations with parents.
It’s said in the media.
On social media.
It’s said by activists who campaign around SEND without critically analysing the language they adopt, given to them by the very system they are campaigning against.

‘SEND diagnosis’ is said with meaning, with knowing nods and furrowed brows laced with concern, like it’s actually meaningful.

Except it’s not.

It’s passed off as shorthand for understanding, but what it actually does is distort every part of the conversation about identity, support, and legitimacy. And that can be broken down into four component parts:

First: SEND isn’t a diagnosis. It’s not a medical construct, it’s not a clinical term, and it doesn’t belong to any diagnostic manual. It’s solely an administrative category invented by schools to identify children who don’t fit the mould.

That’s it.

When you say someone has a “SEND diagnosis,” what you’re really saying is: “The system has noticed this child is disruptive and problematic for it, in some form.” What that form is, almost is irrelvant. It doesn’t need to be found out, because it’s about labelling the disruptor. The who, what, why doesn’t really matter, as much as the fact that they are disrupting, and somehow that has to stop.

Second: Support isn’t legally contingent on diagnosis

The law is really transparent on this, it’s literally written into the SEND code of practice: access to educational support is based on need. Not diagnosis. Not labels. Not medical verification.

But in reality? Schools behave as though a diagnosis is the key to the door. No diagnosis? No differentiated support. No paperwork? No EHCP application. No rubber stamp from a doctor, well, we’re sorry our hands are tied.

In reality, diagnosis is often the gateway. That’s the problem. Not because it opens the door, but because the door shouldn’t be locked in the first place. Diagnosis has become the unofficial currency of support, not because the law demands it, but because the system has outsourced its moral and legal responsibility to a clinical gatekeeper.

The result of that is that families are pushed to pursue medicalised labels not necessarily because they want to, but because the school refuses to act without one. The irony here is that most parents want their child to be supported, it’s not their fault that schools place the condition of diagnosis on support, yet parents are being blamed for seeking diagnostic labels for their children to get support. If you are forcing people into acting in a way which you deem as problematic, that’s very much a you problem, Education. Not the fault of parents.

This has come with an additional narrative that parents are seeking support, conditional on diagnosis, as a way of giving their child an advantage, a leg up. This narrative has been a round for a while, shown by “a 2017 YouGov poll indicated that the majority of teachers thought that some parents are lobbying for a special needs diagnosis for their child, while genuine ‘sufferers’ are losing out.“

What this also does is track beautifully with the ideology of ‘overdiagnosis’, and the idea that to be identified as Autistic and ADHD is to join some sort of fad or trend that enables you to fraudently claim benefits for challenges that you don’t really have, because you’re not really disabled, are you… We’ve seen this in the latest assault against disabled people in the form of disability benefit reforms, and we hear rhetoric like this out of the mouths of senior politicians and those who wield influence and power over policy makers.

Third: the whole validity of diagnosis in this context, is contestable.

Now, that is a statement that will set the cat among the pigeons.

If you have followed my work closely, or heard my talks or training, you will not be surprised to hear me say that. Why? Because of two reasons:

a) The first is that many of the diagnoses that sit with psychiatric diagnostic manuals are at best flawed and at worst deeply problematic to the point of being harmful. Each of those diagnoses is, like ‘SEND’, a manufactured construct, dynamic in terms of how these constructs often disappear over time (being Gay for example, used to be a diagnosable mental health condition until very, very recently), and which place the humans who are subjected to them within rigid boxes that have been problematically put together. These boxes are often created with a good dash of ableism, racism, sexism, and more, alongside the fact that they are formulated by (yet) again, people who would mostly fall under the banner of white, middle-class, academic, able-bodied, straight, westernised or a product of colonialism.

b) the second is that the framework that sits behind and around my work is the Neurodiversity Paradigm. Not the idea of neurodiversity that most people recognise – which I would call neurodiversity-Lite, but the actual Neurodiversity Paradigm which reconceptualises humanity.

Oh, that’s rather big isn’t it?

If you have no clue what I’m talking about I would suggest that right now you head to this article on ‘What is Neurodiversity‘ and let your brain get blown up a lot. I do guarantee that for most people Neurodiversity is NOT what you thought it was. Once you’ve done that, pop back here and we’ll carry on.

Within the Neurodiversity Paradigm, being Autistic, being ADHD, being dyspraxic or otherwise (there are limitless ways you can be Neurodivergent both from birth, and acquired, it is a socio-political label not one contingent on medicalisation) are not disorders. They are identities. Ways of being. Neurological realities that exist with or without institutional recognition. None of this is negating that different people can need support, some intensely so, just that you can meet those needs without having to dehumanise, stigmatise, and pathologise them to (often, literally) death, and also alongside that, perhaps stop considering yourself through a lens of superiority (even if you don’t think that’s what you are doing, you are) and as the ideal human in this process – just because you were able to conform, and now gatekeep access for others.

Collapsing those experiences into “diagnosis” reinforces the idea that someone else has to name you before your reality counts. That until a form is filled out and a code is entered, your needs are optional. And that the way that someone else has defined a label that they stick on is definitive and true. A perfect example for that is autism – probably one of the most misunderstood experiences on the planet. If you’d like to know more about that, here to my article on ‘What is Autism‘ – like the Neurodiversity one, you are highly likely to get your brain blown up a lot.

I find it deeply ironic that educational institutions who use words like Neurodiversity, and whom usually have a ‘Neurodiversity awareness’ day, week, or month; are also using terms like ASD and ASC and place all their investment in the condition and disorder narrative. They invest in the narrative of Neurodiversity as a promotional tool, without understanding it in any way other than superficial. It’s immensely problematic, hypocritical and harmful. In practice, they are framing Neurodivergent children through the most ableist of lenses, reliant on the ideas of disorders and dysfunction, and partake in active exclusion under the banner of inclusion.

I mean if we’re going to talk about a lack of reflective practice, here is a tweet from Tom Bennett OBE, who has been named as the ‘Behaviour Tsar’ – a consultant to the Department for Education, at the highest level of government in England and Wales. This is a recent tweet from Tom (He tweets an awful lot). The reason for me including this is that Tom is supremely confident in both his definition of neurodiversity, his description of neurodiversity and what is included under it, the history of Neurodiversity, his appeals to authority of Judy Singer. Yet he does a grand job of being fundamentally and utterly wrong about most of it, and the bits he does get right, he either misconstrues or misrepresents to sell his own narrative. It’s a fascinating read, like watching a car crash in written form. It’s quite impressive what one person can get so wrong yet be so confidant with. It also speaks to everything I have said so far in terms of the SEND narrative, and highlights how dangerous it is to have deeply misinformed people with incredibly strong opinions, in decision making roles that affect millions of people. It begs the question, if he’s this wrong about this, what else is he wrong about.

I have added the text below the image as it does not display well, though you may go and read it for yourself here.

“Neurodiversity is a common term in education- and society. But it lacks precision both in definition and usage. And that really matters in the real world.

For a start ‘neurodiverse’ is not a clinically recognised or used term, eg in the DSM-5. It was coined by the sociologist Judy Singer in 1998, as an advocacy term for people with ASD and very closely related conditions.

‘Neurodivergent’ describes an individual whose brain functions differently from the majority. Clinically recognized examples include autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette syndrome, and others. These are formal neurodevelopmental diagnoses.

Crucially this means people who have been born with a life-long condition. It does not include people with anxiety disorders, or dementia, or PTSD, or depression etc. It doesn’t mean ‘everything’.

There is no diagnosis ‘neurodiverse’. It is a purely vernacular term, with multiple meanings depending on who is using it and who you talk to. Clinicians diagnose specific conditions, like ASD.

And of course even clinically diagnosable conditions like ASD, ADHD are subject to intense debates about how the category is defined, is it too broad or narrow etc.

Diagnostic criteria can vary from country to country, LA to LA, school to school. And so can the response strategies. What a lot of people outside of either the education or clinical sectors don’t realise is that this is an area that is crying out for high quality research, clarity, transparency, and honesty about what works, and when, and when it doesn’t work. We are often talking about very different things when we use the same words carelessly.

The common use of ‘neurodiverse’ matters; it is often heard in advocacy discourse, the media, etc. but frequently misunderstood.

It doesn’t mean ‘a little bit different’. We are all different from one another. People who claim to be ‘a little bit autistic’ may very well simply misunderstand that some of the characteristics they identify in that category are also perfectly normal-spectrum qualities that many people have. Liking your house to be tidy doesn’t mean that you are neurodivergent. Being a stickler for details doesn’t mean you have OCD. If the term means ‘everything’ then it means ‘nothing.’

It has become fashionable for people to self diagnose and self-refer as neurodivergent, even in the face of little evidence. Because it confers, for some, a sense of being special, different, or interesting. And of course in a sector where we rightly seek to support people/ students who need reasonable accommodations in order to promote inclusivity, the incorrect assignation of an unmet need leads to unfair advantages over those who do not receive those accommodations.

A small but growing group of activists now campaign on the platform that almost any mental health difference indicates neurodivergence, but this is a huge definitional drift, without any clinical basis. You see a lot of this activism in education, often perfectly well-meant. Singer herself would have disagreed strongly with this.

The reason this matters is that if we treat all mental health problems, all behavioural disorders, all learning problems, as having lifelong neurological foundations – which they absolutely do not- then we create a narrative that indicates all individuals face insurmountable obstacles in modifying the behaviours associated with the condition. Some children identified as dyslexic, for example, are simply deficient in high quality reading instruction.

But if you treat every child that behaves unsuccessfully in the classroom as being neurodivergent, then you create a circumstance where we treat them as the victims of irresistible compulsions, rather than human beings with the ability to learn to take responsibility, to grow, to change their habits and attitudes. It is also a substantial abandonment of our commitment to only use evidence info strategies with children- especially the most vulnerable.

In other words, not all forms of SEND are indications of neurodivergent conditions. And most certainly aren’t.

Sadly, as in so many fields, many of the strategies recommended for children with any form of SEND, including forms of neurodivergence, lack substantial or credible evidence bases. There is a lot of well-meant money being spent on approaches that simply have no basis in research, impact or other outcomes.

This is an area that cries out for high quality evidence bases, and evidence informed approaches to support students with genuine need, not activism that leads to treating all children as incapable. But the energy of that activism, married to evidence, could produce something spectacular for those who need help the most, and I hope we see this happen in the future.”

Tom has been spectacularly wrong about most things related to Neurodiversity, and specifically autism and ADHD. And I, like many, many other people, have been blocked by him, simply for pointing this out. Interesting behaviour, from the behaviour tsar who calls himself a free-speech advocate…

Anyway, back to the point: This is the deeper violence of the phrase “SEND diagnosis.” It doesn’t just misuse language. It entrenches Neurological Imperialism. It imposes the idea that there is one standard way of being, and that all other ways must be examined, named, managed, and approved by the dominant system before they are allowed to exist in full view.

What this does is place education, an institution designed for compliance and conformity, as the arbiter of truth. It says: “You’re not Autistic until you disrupt a classroom.” “You’re not ADHD until your working memory gets in the way of the curriculum.” “Your identity only matters when it becomes inconvenient to us.” But hey, let’s spend a week a year performatively celebrating difference in ‘Neurodiversity Awareness Week’.

Fourth: and, if you can believe it, a far more problematic narrative to this idea of ‘SEND diagnoses’

I hate to break it to you educators, but school is not the centre of the universe. The world doesn’t revolve around you. School might be really important to you, but it doesn’t give you the right to create a narrative whereby children’s (and the adult they grow into’s) whole existences are framed around you.

That’s a little egotistical. Actually no, that’s REALLY fucking egotistical.

Being Autistic has nothing to do with school. ADHD isn’t a classroom issue. These are not educational categories. They are whole-body, whole-life neurodevelopmental identities that existed long before a teacher ever logged a concern on CPOMS.

Through the concept of ‘SEND diagnoses’, education has, in its arrogance, simply made itself the lens through which those identities are seen, filtered, interpreted, and pathologised. To define these experiences through the lens of ‘SEND diagnoses’ means that Education has inserted itself into the question of who someone is, with such certainty, it now believes it has the right to decide.

That’s not support. That’s hubris.

The phrase “SEND diagnosis” doesn’t just re-centre the system. It recasts neurodivergent identity as education-adjacent. It makes school the site of visibility, the de facto place where a child’s difference is first noticed, named, and documented. But education is not the authority on identity and teachers are some of the least qualified to recognise an Autistic or ADHD child. Indeed most teachers have a really poor understanding of child development across physical, emotional and identity stages.

When a setting, system or individual teacher starts to behave as though it is the authority, that’s not just arrogant, it’s colonisation.

In my recent article on ‘EBSA’ and ‘School Refusal’ I wrote:

“Understanding should not be contingent on paperwork. And when it is, the children who fall through the cracks are not missing – they are being erased.”

A ‘SEND diagnosis’ is one of the ways we erase them.

A child’s identity is not dependent on whether the system has caught up. Their needs are not more valid once they’ve been rubber-stamped. And no teacher, no policy, no institution gets to decide when a child becomes real, as much as they consider themselves as having that power. If they don’t consider themselves as having that power, or being party to this, but still act in this way, then that speaks to the lack of real meaningful reflection on the privilege and supremacy held by the education system.

Performative inclusion and charity

SEND is not about accessibility or justice, it doesn’t open the front doors wider. It builds a side entrance with a bouncer outside it.

You don’t get through that entrance unless you’ve been labelled, assessed, tolerated, and deemed worthy. Even then, you’ll only be let in on the condition that you don’t ask for too much, you don’t place any demands on the system or make the system uncomfortable, and you remember to say thank you.

This is just control dressed up as compassion, not inclusion.

We talk about reasonable adjustments as if they’re liberatory, but they’re just the system’s way of saying, “We’ll shift things a little for you, as long as it’s not too inconvenient for us. We get to decide what that shifting looks like, and we’re going to make you jump through all of the hoops to get that shift to happen.” EHCPs sound like bespoke plans, but they’re often used to formalise the bare minimum and rarely worth the paper they are printed on, despite the (often) years-long battles to get things in place. “Specialist provision” promises something different, but what it usually means is “not quite like mainstream, but still exactly the same problems.” ‘Specialist autism provision’ rarely means “A meaningful and working understanding of contemporary autism theory and neurodiversity-affirming practice”, it usually means less children, and a different framework which may or may not benefit an Autistic child to some degree.

In all this, the language of reasonable adjustments is euphemistic, the delivery is conditional on arbitrary things residing with where the power lies, and the purpose is always the same: to maintain the shape of a system that refuses to change its foundations.

This is how performative inclusion works. The school remains the same, the curriculum remains the same, the behaviour policies remain the same. But now there’s a TA in the room. Or a workstation in the corner. Or a colour-coded timetable and a laminated social story. Or a five minute movement break a quarter of the way through the day.

These aren’t necessarily bad things in isolation, but they are also not revolutionary, and usually only in isolation, and definitely nowhere near enough. They are merely survival aids created with the least possible effort, offered within a structure that remains fundamentally hostile to difference and hostile to change.

Even those small acts of adaptation are not guaranteed because support is still treated as generosity, not entitlement. It’s framed as an act of kindness. A moral gesture. Something granted by ‘good teachers’ and ‘inclusive’ schools. But this framing is profoundly dangerous not only because it’s a moral good wrapped up in performative effort, but it comes with conditions… Conditional on compliance, conditional on diagnosis, conditional on whether the school budget can stretch far enough to meet a legal duty they should have planned for in the first place if they were being truly inclusive.

Support is rationed not by need, but by how tolerable the child is deemed to be, and how expensive their needs might become. This conditional compassion is even more fragile for children who are Black, Brown, working-class, or otherwise read as less worthy of grace. What support should not depend upon is whether a child’s mask manifests in a way to avoid notice, or in a way that means that they’re deemed “too capable” to require help. It shouldn’t depend on whether a parent can write convincing enough documentation to trigger a needs assessment. Nor should it depend on whether a teacher personally believes the child is “really Autistic.”. Or whether or not Tom Bennett approves…

And yet it often does.

Even where the law is clear, the culture is slippery. Families are left fighting for things their child is legally entitled to. They are forced to be grateful for things that should never have been withheld, like being allowed to leave a room, to pee when you need to, or to wear clothes that don’t cause you pain. To be rightfully distressed because you are in a building, a system, an ecology, that forces you into distress.

And when the fight becomes too much?

It’s not the system that’s blamed, it’s the family. Too demanding. Too emotional. Too difficult.

This is an #NotAllEducators moment

There are educators trying, lots of them, if you’re reading this and are an educator, you are probably one of the tryers. But the system they, and you, are trying within is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and that matters, because good intentions don’t make up for bad structures. You can follow the law and still uphold injustice. You can care deeply and still be part of the harm. Trying harder in a broken system doesn’t fix the system, it perpetuates it.

The implied or explicit idea that neurodivergent children are burdens, and that support is a favour done on their behalf is one of charity. It’s the same logic that gives us terms like “special school” and “special needs.” Language that implies exception, deviation, and infantilisation. Language that positions the child as a problem, and any attempt to accommodate them as benevolence.

Being grateful for scraps doesn’t mean the scraps are enough.

The problem was never the child.

The problem is a culture that mistakes compliance for inclusion and silence for success.

The problem is an educational structure so invested in its own legitimacy that it rebranded exclusion as support and called it progress.

And instead of reflecting on why that might have created problems, every attempt at reform just rebrands the same package. If the tool is not right, change it, don’t just go out and buy a different brand of the same tool.

Inclusion is not just about what’s added. It’s about what’s interrogated, dismantled, and rebuilt. Inclusion is about justice. So, when we talk about ‘SEND provision’, we have to ask: who sets the terms? Who decides what’s “reasonable”? Who controls the narrative around what help looks like, and who deserves it?

If a system only helps children when it feels like it, how it feels like it, and only if they perform need in the right way, that’s not inclusion. That’s control and power and an unwillingness to flex or bend.

It’s time we stopped calling it anything else.

And maybe the best people to deconstruct this, are neither ill-informed governmental departments run by civil servants, ideologist consultants who speak to things with an authority that they have no right to claim, nor ill-informed Ministers subject to lobbying; Nor those within the bubble of the education, who see everything only through the lens of education, who are part of the problem.

Who does that leave?

I’m not really sure. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognise that there is something horribly, horribly wrong with our model of education, and that people recognising this isn’t a new thing, it’s just become more and more obvious as the noose of education has tightened around our children’s necks.

Mental health crisis? Performatively parachute in a handful of under-resourced mental health nurses to serve thousands of children. Tell the kids they have to “catch up” with no explanation of what they’re meant to be catching up to. Tell them that unless they’re in school 100% of the time, their futures are doomed – no nuance, no care, just pressure masquerading as progress.

Or hire a Children’s Commissioner like Dame Rachel De Souza, who says things like:

“Often a SEND diagnosis is used as an excuse for poor attendance in school, low attainment and poor expectations for higher education and employment. I believe that a diagnosis – if one is needed at all – should simply be one route into further support and the right interventions to ensure that a child can achieve their ambitions.”

…

“If one is needed at all.”

…

If I hadn’t written so much already I could spend a week unpicking just that one line. The disbelief. The lack of knowledge underpinning it. The casual dismissal of lived realities that our erstwhile Children’s Commissioner claims to be compassionate to, empathetic for, then disregards with a carefully crafted throwaway line.

The larger statement manages to victim-blame families, erase children’s rights under the guise of benevolence, and reduce identity to a tool for compliance. A statement that gatekeeps recognition, pathologises difference, and treats support as a reward for the right kind of suffering.

And one within which, completely unironically, uses the phrase ‘SEND diagnosis’.

I rest my case, your honour.

Actually, no I don’t.

Who benefits from the construct of SEND?

If SEND is a construct, then we have to ask: who constructed it?

Who benefits from keeping it standing?

Because, momentarily excluding Dame Rachel de Souza and the Children’s Commission who exist as a connected part of the problem, there is an entire industry propped up by the construct of SEND. One that trades in acronyms and audits, checklists and thresholds, targets and tribunals. There are careers made in identifying “special needs,” teams built to oversee “intervention pathways,” and roles created to manage what is essentially a parallel system: one adjacent to education, but one never allowed to disrupt it.

The SEND machine is not designed to dismantle barriers, only administrate them so therefore it doesn’t reward transformation, rather it rewards identification. Schools are applauded for flagging children with “needs,” but not for changing the systems that made those needs invisible, unbearable, or pathologised in the first place. There’s more incentive to complete the paperwork than to challenge the policy. More reward for risk assessment and reduction than for risk taking. As the need increases, so too does the paperwork. More forms. More frameworks. More professionals who never meet the child but busily talk about the child like they know them.

And the child not existing as a human being, but as a living, breathing £ sign. As a monetary drain. A financial burden that must be minimised, mitigated against.

Stigma and dehumanisation writ large from a system that defines itself through children’s ‘well-being’ and ‘future prospects’.

The ideology of SEND doesn’t disrupt educational power. It extends it, rebranded.

This is the logic of neurological imperialism at work. It’s a system that colonises neurodivergent experience, defines it through the lens of pathology, and repositions the solution as better oversight, not structural change. That colonisation is not just clinical, it’s also cultural and relational. It dictates how children are spoken to, how distress is interpreted, how difference is ranked, and who is allowed to belong. It reshapes identity to fit within what institutions are willing to see, and erases what they are not.

The deeper irony is that even the criteria for accessing this lane is false. As I mentioned earlier, UK law does not require diagnosis in order to offer support, the sole requirement is need. But diagnosis has become the unofficial currency to identifying need, not because the law demands it, but because, as I said earlier, the system has outsourced its moral responsibility to a clinical gatekeeper. This shift allows schools to delay, defer, or deny support by claiming their hands are tied, deferring the ‘problem’ onto another service that they can point to as having failed. Children fall apart while the paperwork is processed. But the system sees a completed referral as success, even if the child has already disappeared.

The issue is not that resources aren’t available. The issue is where they go. How they are spent. An enormous proportion of time, energy, and funding is spent servicing the bureaucracy itself, not meeting the needs of children. It is easier to create new roles to manage failure than to ask why failure is so endemic in the first place. Entire departments, job roles, tribunals, Judges, administrators, educational psychologists, Speech and Language Therapists, solicitors, consultancy schemes, and training programmes and much more, all rely on that failure.

The more the system excludes, the more professionals it hires to supervise the exclusion. And it is excluding. And obviously collapsing, when headlines such as these start appearing:

“SEND deficits risk bankrupting almost three quarters of England’s largest councils by 2027”

The answer to this is not more SEND, or different SEND, or less SEND (by denying rights and funding).

The answer to this is to address a much wider problem.

I’ve been arguing about the fallacy of SEND for years. I’ve watched parents, advocates, organisations drive protest after protest, urging more and more money to be thrown at something fruitlessly, which is wrapped up in a wider problem that they seem ill-equipped to recognise. The resolution doesn’t lie in ‘SEND reform’; it’s lies in education reform. It lies in cultural and societal reform. It’s good to see others start to finally start to align under one very simple truth:

The UK education system is not fit for purpose and hasn’t been for a very long time. The whole idea of what school is and what it’s purpose is in the 21st century (and looking forward) has to be reflected on and addressed.

This is highlighted in this open letter from the Association of UK Psychologists:

And this petition by Uk Clinical and Educational Psychologists:

There are educators resisting. There are professionals working against the grain; as these letters and petitions show. This shows from the work done by all the Education and Education adjacent professionals I work with, who are refusing to comply with the performance of support. By the SENCOs like the ones I often work with, but more specifically have personally experienced with my own children (you know who you are if you are reading this), who have near broken themselves striving for change and to be Islands of Safety for the children they know are drowning under the tide of unmet needs, right in front of them.

They’re doing this in a system that treats them like fleas, which smiles at them while constantly trying to shake them off.

They are sadly the exception.

And they are burning out. Too quickly

This is the ecosystem of SEND: a sprawling, well-funded structure that consumes immense amounts of resource just to preserve the illusion of inclusion. It gives the appearance of care, without the redistribution of power. It creates language for difference, but only through deficit. It offers pathways that are only accessible to those who survive the proving process.

It becomes self-sustaining, not because it works, but because so many jobs, budgets, and reputations depend on its survival. Much like actual charities who are created with the purpose of resolving a need or crisis, but then dance to the tune of funding, overheads, being employers. It quickly shifts from the grassroots from which it sprung, to corporatism and soullessness. This is the model education and SEND has followed. It’s own self importance prioritised over the needs of the people it is supposed to serve.

The existence of support structures does not mean equity has been achieved. Often, it’s the opposite: those structures rely on structural failure to justify their own existence. Inclusion doesn’t scale well under capitalism. So SEND becomes a compromise. A side-channel. A means of ticking boxes without letting go of control.

Yet we’re told this is support. We’re told this is progress. We’re told this is inclusion.

What Gets Missed: Identity, Culture, and the Whole Child

One of the many lies told by the construct of SEND is that it sees children at all.

It doesn’t.

It sees interruption. It sees children only in relation to how difficult they are to teach.

Children aren’t interruptions. Nor are they categories to be managed. They are whole, emerging, relational people, with a right to development. They aren’t just a ‘behaviour’ to be modified or subordinates to a curriculum. They are not neurodivergent just when the lesson starts, who become cured by the bell.

Being Autistic, or ADHD, or Dyspraxic, or PDA, or otherwise neurodivergent in any other way, from birth or acquired (Yes, Tom, acquired) is not an educational inconvenience, nor a ‘SEND diagnosis’. It is an entire way of being in the world. It encompasses how we move, how we learn, how we perceive, communicate, relate, connect, feel, and exist. It is biological. Cultural. Sensory. Emotional. Neurological. Developmental. Socio-political.

But none of that is visible to a system trained to see risk and mitigation, not identity and becoming.

It slices children into functional fragments: “struggles with transitions,” “needs support in class,” “dysregulated.” It doesn’t recognise the whole child, only the impact they have on classroom efficiency. Only the symptoms that disturb someone else’s plan.

And we cannot talk about identity without talking about intersectionality. Race, class, gender, language, and culture shape how neurodivergence is perceived, denied, punished, or pathologised. For many children, what should be labelled a “need” is simply a difference the system refuses to understand and then seeks to punish. Support is rationed not by actual experience, but by how well a child’s difference fits the system’s narrow template of legitimacy.

Neurodivergent cultures exist.

Ones that are sensory, rhythmic, intuitive, nonlinear, associative, communicative, emotional – communal and expressive, shaped by shared experience and relational knowing, but the system treats this all as noise instead of signal. It pathologises what could be a language, a practice, a way of being, and it deletes our cultures before they have the chance to be named.

Beneath the surface of all this labelling is a deeper problem: most educators have never been supported to understand what Autistic or ADHD development actually looks like. Indeed they are rarely supported to know what autism or ADHD are beyond superficial and problematic framings. What they think they know is usually decades out of date, taught by peer professionals with problematic knowledge bases shaped by stereotypes, deficit models, or at best a performative nod to contemporary autism theory and practice. Teachers, unfortunately, also often have a near-total absence of contemporary developmental knowledge about children generally. This is not to blame teachers, but teacher training is solely inadequate for modern societies needs. Emotional lability becomes “meltdown.” Intense focus becomes “obsession.” Sensory regulation becomes “disruption.” What’s missing is a developmental lens rooted in neurodivergent truth, not neurotypical expectation.

What exists instead is too often behaviourism.

And the defensive line of “I’ve had lots of Autistic children in my class“?

The system doesn’t recognise divergence as legitimate, it treats it as failure to comply. And it doesn’t give educators the opportunity to know any different. Especially as everything in education is seen through the lens of education, or its relevance to education as educators see it; education adjacent.

As I have said, I very rarely met badly intentioned professionals, especially in education. But good intentions do, as the saying goes, pave the road to hell. Wanting to help isn’t the same as being equipped to help. Good intentions don’t erase the harm of outdated knowledge. The failure to update your understanding from meaningful and knowing sources is not benign, it’s a refusal to see the child in front of you. It makes you a White Knight, a rescuer, a hero, blundering in thinking you know enough about the situation to be able to solve the problem, without acknowledging that you are the problem, or at least a part of it – you may not see yourself in that way, but that doesn’t negate that this is in fact what you are doing.

Education assumes it delivers knowledge to passive recipients. But development, across biology, physiology, identity, emotionality, and learning, is construction. It’s meaning-making. It’s a child building themselves in dialogue with their environment, and if ‘SEND’ doesn’t know how to listen, mainstream definitely doesn’t.

A system that colonises neurodivergent experience, defines it through the lens of pathology, and repositions the solution as better oversight rather than structural change does not merely misunderstand difference, it enacts Neurological Imperialism, controlling identities through medicalised surveillance and educational containment. This is a systemic and a cultural issue.

The language used to describe children in this system is heavily loaded with terms like:

“challenging,”

“non-compliant,”

“high-functioning,”

or “school refuser”

All serving to pathologise emotional truths and erase structural context. These are instruments of epistemic violence, weapons of colonisation.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Because if identity can be erased by systems, it can also be nurtured by relationships. If the construct of ‘SEND’ can fragment the child, then practice, curiosity, and connection can reassemble them. If diagnosis can be used to justify gatekeeping, then trust can be used to justify listening.

The harm of fixing children instead of systems

When a child struggles in school, when they bolt from the room, stop attending, fall apart at home, or become a shell of themselves; the first question the system asks is: what’s wrong with the child?

Not: What’s wrong with the structure?

Not: Why couldn’t we see this coming?

Not: What in our environment made this response necessary?

Not: What is wrong with us?

But: What is wrong with the child?

The foundational harm at the heart of SEND is that it doesn’t address injustice, it just reinterprets it as dysfunction. SEND reframes distress as deficit, turning survival strategies into symptoms, and translating systemic violence into a paperwork trail. The child becomes the site of failure and once you’ve located the failure in the child, you’ve already absolved the system.

Masking is a perfect example.

Not the narrow version of masking that, at best circulates in schools, the tidy, quiet, palatable Autistic child who looks like they’re coping because they’re still smiling. The actuality of Autistic masking, ADHD masking, masking experienced by a large variety of marginalised groups that exist within the SEND narrative. Masking, from an Autistic or ADHD perspective isn’t only about trying to appear more neurotypical, or fit in. It’s about projecting acceptability in whatever form is most likely to keep the child safe, included, or ignored; and that can express itself in an enormous variety of ways.

For some children, that means shrinking, disappearing, pleasing, performing typicality as best they can. For others, it means performing big behaviours, or weirdness. It can be the class clown, the social butterfly, the child who leans into their “difficult” reputation because that’s the role they’ve learned gets them the most predictable outcome. Sometimes it looks like taking up space strategically, because being loudly unacceptable is still a way to stay safe in a system that’s already decided you’re a problem.

But SEND doesn’t see any of this. It applauds the acts of quiet masking as acts of conformity, and any other form of masking as a performance failure. It waits for a child to combust before it considers support, and even then, it asks whether that child was trying hard enough to begin with. The child who holds it together until 3:30 is considered “fine.” The one who melts down at 10:45 is labelled dysregulated, unstable, or manipulative. Neither is seen in context. Neither is understood as someone surviving a system that demanded performance over safety.

And not all children are offered the same script. A white Autistic child may be framed as sensitive. A Black Autistic child may be read as aggressive. A quiet boy may be seen as thoughtful; a quiet girl as withdrawn. A child from a multilingual household may be misunderstood as inattentive or behind. Cultural identity, race, gender, and class all shape which expressions of distress are treated with concern, and which are sanctioned, silenced, or ignored. The system doesn’t simply fail to see all children, it chooses whose pain it legitimises.

Open dysregulation is read as behavioural failure. Burnout is reframed as poor resilience. Masking in the form of suppression is rewarded until it collapses, and then the collapse is treated as personal weakness. SEND systems are not built to understand this cycle, they are built to perpetuate it then contain it, and containment begins with language: “Emotionally Based School Avoidance.” “Oppositional Defiant Behaviour.” “School Refusal.” “Low Resilience.” “Attachment Issues.” Each of these terms relocates the burden back onto the child and their body, their identity, their families.

And yet, the system can only offer support once that burden has been sufficiently pathologised. The need must be visible, documented, and verified by the right kind of authority. It has to be entered into the system through the correct portal: a diagnosis, a plan, a label. Not because that child’s needs suddenly emerged, but because the system refuses to recognise need unless it’s translated into language it already understands.

SEND, in this way, functions as a border checkpoint. It guards the limited resources of an exclusionary system by demanding proof that a child deserves support. Proof that they are exceptional in the most burdensome way possible. That their need is excessive and their suffering is disruptive enough to matter. Only then will the system consider helping, and even then, only in ways it deems reasonable.

This is how human needs become “special needs.” Not because they are rare, but because the system has narrowed its definition of what a child should be to such a degree that only those who cannot perform it are seen as deserving of care.

It has narrowed its definition of human.

Autonomy, rest, predictability, communication support, cultural affirmation, identity validation, safety: these aren’t fringe accommodations, but basic human requirements. In a system built around standardisation though, they are treated as deviations. SEND doesn’t exist to meet these needs. It exists to manage their visibility and construct a taxonomy of “difficulty”, ensuring that only the most thoroughly assessed, thoroughly diagnosed, thoroughly pathologised children are considered worthy of intervention. A binary manifests: Everyone is either coping or failing, if they’re coping it’s because school is doing such a good job; and if they’re failing, it must be everyone else’s fault.

Culture, too, is erased in this process. Regulation strategies rooted in family practice such as movement, song, storytelling, spiritual grounding, or communal care, are cast as distractions or defiance. Communication that doesn’t conform to the dominant rhythm like gesture, echolalia, AAC, multilingual, is treated as either inappropriate or insufficient. The system doesn’t ask, “What does communication and safety look like for this child?” It asks, “Why aren’t they more like us and how can we make them more like us?”

There is no space in this framework for curiosity, or room to ask why a child resists, shuts down, or masks so hard they lose themselves. There is no room to ask what version of safety the child has never experienced.

Within the education system there is no room to acknowledge that for many Autistic children the greatest trauma is not what was done to them, but what they were forced to do to themselves, in order to be allowed to stay inside it. This is how masking becomes the system’s tool as much as it is the child’s survival strategy. The child performs acceptability; the system accepts the performance.

Until it doesn’t.

SEND is not a protective framework. It is a framing device. One that allows the system to appear benevolent while enacting structural neglect by individualising ‘failure’, and naming distress in diagnostic language. And in doing so, it ensures that the problem is always the child and never the building they’re drowning in.

No child has ‘special’ needs.

They just have needs the system has little interest in catering to.

There is no such thing as special needs

Are you with me yet?

We don’t need more reform. We need release.

The failure of SEND isn’t just in its language, or its labels, or the endless bureaucracy surrounding it. It’s in the very idea that inclusion should be conditional; that children must first become diagnosable, deviant, or broken enough before we respond. That a child’s difference and therefore limited ability or inability to access education is a failure of them, not a failure of the system that half-arsedly attempts to shoehorn that child into it.

But we’ve already said what’s wrong. We’ve named the violence. We’ve counted the cost.

So what now?

We stop managing the failure and we start imagining something else entirely.

Because what’s required isn’t a better version of SEND. It’s the end of education as we know it, and the beginning of one rooted in relationship, dynamism, responsiveness, and respect for human variation.

One that fits with the needs of the world we live in, the reality of the world we live in. One that is fit for purpose.

That shift doesn’t begin with new paperwork. It begins with new principles:

1 Start from human variation, not statistical average. Design systems for the range of minds and bodies that already exist, be flexible enough to account for those you can’t imagine, and don’t hold a system for the one mythical “normal” child who fits your metrics. Education should grow around the learners, not the other way round.

2 Prioritise relationship over legibility. Don’t wait for a label to tell you a child is struggling. If you need a diagnosis to take a child’s distress seriously, the problem isn’t the child, it’s what counts as evidence in your system.

3 End the fantasy of neutrality. Standardised practice is never neutral. It privileges some children and penalises others. Every curriculum, every policy, every exam, every behaviour framework embeds cultural, neurological, and classed assumptions.

4 Hold support as a right, not a reward. No child should have to prove they are suffering to access what makes learning possible. Support should be proactive, embedded, assumed. If a child thrives with it, that’s not cheating, that’s success.

5 Stop asking who the child is. Start asking what the environment does. Behaviour is not self-contained, it is relational, contextual, and communicative. Shift the focus from what’s ‘wrong’ with the child, to what the context demands, ignores, or suppresses.

6 Recognise culture and intersectionality as foundations, not variables. Language, identity, community, race, class, gender, and cultural norms are not distractions from education they are education. Build systems that honour cultural ways of learning, communicating, regulating, and being. Stop translating everything into white, straight, middle class, Christian, patriarchal, ideals, and calling it support.

7 Refuse the myth of the “SEND child.” There are no ‘SEND children.’ There are no ‘SEND diagnoses’, Only children navigating a system that wasn’t built for them, and has no interest in bending for them. Dismantle the labels that say some needs are too complex, too rare, too inconvenient. Complexity is not a burden it’s an invitation to design better.

This is not a call for perfection. It is a call for refusal:

Refuse the logic that says we need to fix children before we can teach them.
Refuse the idea that support must be earned through diagnosis.
Refuse the scripts that frame compliance as inclusion.
Refuse SEND as a structure that manages harm instead of preventing it.

And build something else.

Build trust, not tolerance.
Build practices that make sense before a child breaks.
Build systems that expect difference, welcome unpredictability, and honour expression in all its forms. Not as an add-on. Not as a ‘reasonable adjustment.’ Not as a path through SEND.

As the default. As the beginning.

The power to do this lies with policymakers. With funding bodies, inspection frameworks, and the departments that define what ‘counts’ as education. But also with the schools, local authorities, and professional bodies that choose to comply. It also lies with every educator who has ever paused, looked at a child in distress, and thought: this isn’t right, but I’m told to do it anyway. You are not the cause of this harm. But you might be part of its continuation. And that means you can be part of its end.

A revolution doesn’t have to be grand. It can be quiet refusal. It can be collective challenge. It can be in the policies you push back against, the EHCPs you write differently, the child you choose to believe before their diagnosis arrives.

We are trapped in fear, paralysed by risk, by change; terrified of acknowledging or admitting we’ve been causing harm, so now is time to be furious, curious, and to be bold.

Now is the time to decolonise.

SEND isn’t real, but the exclusion is.

So we need to stop refining the exclusion and start rewriting the terms of education itself.

Keep in touch with Kieran Rose, The Autistic Advocate

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