(UK) Times: 'Restlessness or distractibility,' 'institutional incentives' behind SPED crisis

April 1, 2026, The Times:  The special needs crisis — blame the system, not us parents

My daughter is 14. She’s not on her phone, she’s not slumped over a laptop on the bed in her foetid teenage bedroom, she’s not stomping around the house being horrible.

I recently found her zooming around the patio crouched down on her brother’s Segway. The winter rain had stopped briefly, it was dark out and she didn’t have his permission to use it, which added to the excitement. “I’m pretending I’m driving on a road, it’s so much fun,” she told me, then asked for a plastic plate to use as a steering wheel.

By “normal” standards this may appear to be strange behaviour for a teenager but what if it’s our concept of what’s normal that is, in fact, strange?

In recent years there’s been a shift in the way we think about differences in the human brain. Referrals for ADHD and autism have risen dramatically, with about one in six adults meeting criteria for a common mental health condition. Nearly one in ten young adults “self-identify” as autistic.

A government inquiry commissioned by Wes Streeting this week has concluded that while there is “credible evidence of a real increase in distress, especially among young people” there is also a worry that normal difficulties such as “restlessness or distractibility” — or in our case being slightly behind the curve and having a great imagination — are increasingly “interpreted primarily through a medical lens”.

The report found that “institutional incentives” are encouraging parents to get a label for their children to access educational support at school.

What is certain is that there are hundreds of thousands of children now on NHS waiting lists awaiting a diagnosis of special educational needs and disabilities (Send) or neurodivergent conditions — and my daughter is one of them. 

She is revising for year 9 school assessments at the moment. I can tell that the standard of her work is poor, that she only half-grasps the things she is going over, but I’m delighted.

That’s because last year she didn’t revise at all, and the year before that she didn’t understand what revision was or how to do it. I saw her raise this with a “normal” friend, whose jaw dropped.

The school has tried to prepare the children well, with booklets explaining what will be tested, revision technique videos and assemblies to support their learning. Until this year none of this registered with her, even though she feels she is trying hard. Our daughter just doesn’t fit in with the system. Increasingly, it seems, more children don’t.

I once learnt that toddlers can’t jump with two feet until they’ve reached a certain level of brain development. There’s no point trying to teach them before then, it just won’t work. But once they’re ready, they learn.

Why do we celebrate the children who are ahead of the curve but see the ones behind it as problematic? Why, when we know that an average value is a functional, made-up idea to explain the mid-point of a range which necessarily extends below and above that point, do we expect all children to be (at least) average? We’ve become ossified around a value that doesn’t even exist.

A child who walks at eight months is a prodigy, we’re delighted! A child who bottom-shuffles until 18 months is initially funny, then concerning. Yet both these are within the “normal” range. The early walker is no more skilled on their feet when they grow up than the “late” one.

I can see the track my daughter is on. I see her physical development, her emotional, social and academic development, and they are all going in the right direction. She’ll get there. But there’s no scope for her to develop at her own pace in school. She doesn’t understand much of what’s going on in class because the ideas and information slot in on top of concepts and knowledge she hasn’t absorbed. She didn’t absorb those because when they were taught she wasn’t developed enough to take them in. Now they’ve been “done”, she’s expected to know them.

We encourage her to ask questions but when she does she still doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to hold the class up or draw attention to herself by asking again. She does the homework tasks she’s set on time (mostly) and feels proud of that without understanding the depth of knowledge she’s missing.

If she were just about to start the year 7 or year 8 curriculum, with all the skills she has now mastered in independent travel, using a work planner, getting from class to class, making time for homework in the evenings and being able to do revision — on top of the benefit of two extra years of brain development — she would be able to take in much more of it. She would be ready to learn.

But in our school system this would be a humiliation. She would tower over the year 7s and stand out as a failure. So she has to swim along with the other children who look like her on the outside, and get on and choose her GCSEs, on a track designed to rush her through on time. Where “time” relates to an idea somebody far, far away once had about what average children should be able to do and when. Not on her time. 

We’re facing a growing crisis of provision in special educational needs. Perhaps it’s time we addressed the elephant in the room. Perhaps it’s not the children who are the problem.

Perhaps, in a less rigid system, these “problems” would be embraced as normal, beautiful, human variation. Perhaps the school system itself is what needs to be treated and healed. Instead of pathologising the children — the symptoms — perhaps we should diagnose what’s ailing the system.

Questions are the foundations of diagnosis. Here are some to kick us off: what is our education system for? Who is it serving? How have years of school league tables, and pressure to test often and score highly, affected teachers and pupils? What has happened to those subjects where attainment can’t be measured in numbers, and what impact has that had on children’s development and wellbeing? 

That would be a welcome addition to the national conversation on diagnosis. And maybe, just maybe, as we answer these questions we’ll find more room for children who don’t fit that mythic “average”.

A few caveats.

First, many children have learning difficulties or conditions that are not related to the school system in this way. I’m speaking only from one perspective.

Second, I don’t attribute any malice to the system. The structures we’ve put in place over the past 150 years to guide our children through time, to give them a comprehensive education, and to help each one reach their potential, speak of the very best intentions a developed society could embrace. 

But it’s time to update the assumptions and intentions behind those structures. And to remember that above all it is our resilience, imagination, empathy, creativity and an ability to live constructively and joyfully with people who are different from ourselves (including in their passage through time) that will create a better future.