With shrinking budgets in schools, barely trained teachers drowning in paperwork and underpaid classroom assistants having to multitask at everything from running breakfast clubs to kids with serious medical conditions, it’s a miracle there hasn’t been a catastrophe so far.
However some have argued that the general increase in children with special educational needs could very well be the proverbial straw on the back of the camel. The cost of training teachers and classroom assistants, setting up specialist areas and the general day-to-day realities are an awful lot for already overburdened schools to deal with.
Considering that a report published last year that certain areas have closed waiting lists altogether and another 31 have redrawn the boundaries to qualify as ASD, it seems the NHS is starting to buckle.
Is this a consequence of our risk averse society and is it writing people off before their lives have truly begun?
Dave Clements thinks so.
A consultant who has written for The Guardian and the Huffington Post among others and a former governor at a primary school, his experiences with his own child have inspired this book as well as what he sees are larger cultural issues that manifest themselves through this debate.
As he says:
There are, without a doubt, genuine needs now being identified that we wouldn’t have picked up on before. However, there is also a cultural receptivity to being, or declaring oneself, neurodiverse. To do so is valued, encouraged and even celebrated. While there are positives to this approach in some cases, we need to get beyond the fluffy, relentlessly affirming (but none too reflective) language of neurodiversity-speak. Many of these children face very real disadvantages, both because of their conditions and because of society’s continued failure to accommodate or address their needs effectively.
He begins by discussing the recent trend of celebrities (everyone from Kae Tempest to Darren Day) seemingly being diagnosed with ADHD and finding it so freeing. Of course, others have pointed out that the flipside to that is that what were once considered annoying or bad habits (laziness, lateness, messiness) could now be rewritten as something stunning and brave. The end result being that we reduce life changing conditions to a series of personal habits and choices.
Going on, he points that there is a double standard in the debate: while there is a general air of smugness about ‘understanding nurodiverse people’, they can often be arrested for saying the wrong thing in that moment or even killed. This is why it’s crucial to have genuine conversations about these issues so we don’t subject those who need our help to two-tier standards.
The following quote sums up how broadly the boundaries for autistic spectrum disorder can be:
The autism spectrum includes everything from the severely learning disabled or non-verbal to the academically gifted. Nevertheless, despite these wide variations in presentation, those diagnosed with ASD have three sets of traits in common: difficulty with communication, problems ‘being around people socially’ and particular behavioural characteristics. ‘For a diagnosis of autism’, states the Royal College of Psychiatrists, ‘there must be evidence of unusual development in the first three years of life’.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – guidance produced by the American Psychiatric Association from which experts around the world tend to take their lead – a diagnosis of autism requires ‘persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by the following: deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, in nonverbal communicative behaviours used for social interaction, and in developing, maintaining and understanding relationships’.
And again, there is the stipulation that: ‘Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period…’ However, for the World Health Organisation, there is already some slippage on this point: ‘Characteristics may be detected in early childhood, but autism is often not diagnosed until much later.’
Some might argue that this isn’t a bad thing, but isn’t it better to have well-defined boundaries that draw a distinction between a personality trait and a life changing condition? Does this mean that what we once understood to be misbehaviour wouldn’t be considered as such anymore? Does this mean the standards that parents and teachers pass onto young people have to be constantly rewritten?
It may not have been the first thing you thought of but, like anything, keep digging and you’re left with some fundamental questions that may not be easy to answer.
When discussing how schools have been impacted because of this, Clements does indeed discuss success stories, but he notes that it’s the teachers with years of experience that are at the centre of such tales. Plus, as the number of kids with a diagnosis of ADHD have increased, schools can feel pressurised to put in mitigations in place in order to make it seen that everyone’s in this together. Add in that some teachers are told to think of everyone in their class as neurodiverse; it results in a lowering of stands across the board.
A timely book that asks a lot of questions not just in terms of schools but also wider society in general.
Dave Clements, 2026, The Crisis in the Classroom: How the Special Needs Explosion is Destroying Education, Luath Press. ISBN-13: 978-1804252802
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
