Teddy Square

07/06/2026

05/06/2026

A local authority has asked an NHS SLT to critique my report and once again, they have said I am talking outside my remit. Why? because I discuss the effects of trauma in my report and say the child needs a trauma-informed approach. Apparently trauma has nothing to do with language and communication!!!!

One of the biggest misunderstandings is the belief that trauma only affects behaviour. It doesn't. Trauma affects communication. I cannot do my job properly without a good working knowledge of trauma.

When a child feels unsafe, threatened, misunderstood or overwhelmed, the brain prioritises survival over learning. The parts of the brain responsible for language, problem-solving, emotional regulation and flexible thinking become much harder to access.

This means a child may:

🔹 Hear your words but struggle to process what they mean.
🔹 Know the answer but be unable to find the words.
🔹 Say "I don't know" because they genuinely can't explain.
🔹 Become more literal in their understanding.
🔹 Struggle to follow instructions they could manage perfectly yesterday.
🔹 Shut down, melt down or lose speech altogether.

Ironically, the moment we most want a child to communicate is often the moment they are least able to do so. For autistic children, this can be even more pronounced. Anxiety, sensory overload, social uncertainty and previous experiences of being misunderstood all add to the cognitive load. A child may appear oppositional, rude, avoidant or disengaged when in reality their nervous system is simply overwhelmed.

Trauma isn't always one dramatic event. Sometimes trauma is years of being blamed for a disability nobody recognised, as the boy I was writing about. Sometimes it's constantly being told you're overreacting. Sometimes it's being punished for behaviours that were actually signs of distress. Sometimes it's spending every day trying desperately to fit into an environment that doesn't understand you.

The question we should ask isn't "What's wrong with this child?"
It's "What has happened to this child, and what is their nervous system trying to tell us?"

Communication can only flourish when children feel safe.
Safety before speech. Every time.

I have written back to say I am in a privileged position of having a great deal of experience and training in trauma so I am obviously coming from a different angle to someone with less experience and training.

05/06/2026

The Government has now responded to our petition, and there is something really important that we cannot ignore.

For the first time, the response specifically references support for “autistic children and young people with a Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) profile” within the proposed National Inclusion Standards.

This petition was never about creating a separate diagnosis. It was about recognition, understanding, and ensuring that children and young people with a PDA profile receive appropriate support based on their needs.

The response states:

“National Inclusion Standards will set out the evidence-informed tools, strategies and approaches for educators… to identify and support children and young people with additional needs, including autistic children and young people who may have a Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) profile.”

It also says:

“Access to support should not be dependent on a child or young person having a diagnosis.”

These are positive statements. But now comes the crucial question:

What will this actually mean in practice?

If PDA is to be included within National Inclusion Standards, then PDA-informed approaches must be properly recognised, understood and reflected in the evidence base that informs those standards.

Families, PDAers, educators and professionals know that traditional behaviour-based approaches often fail children with a PDA profile. We need the evidence, research and lived experience around PDA-informed practice to be taken seriously as these standards are developed.

The Government has committed up to £15 million to strengthen the evidence base and says an independent expert panel will help design these standards.

This means our work is not finished. In many ways, it is just beginning.

We now need to ensure that:

• PDA profiles remain visible throughout this process

• PDA-informed approaches are included in future research

• Lived experience is listened to alongside professional expertise

• Schools receive meaningful guidance, training and support

• Recognition leads to real-world change for children and families

• Support should be based on need, not on where a child is educated.

Please continue sharing the petition and the Government response. Every signature helps demonstrate that this community expects more than words - we want meaningful inclusion, evidence-informed practice, and support that genuinely meets the needs of our PDA children.

Recognition is a step forward. Now let’s make sure the standards reflect what PDA families, educators and advocates have been saying for years.

Petition link:
🔗 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/757502

The conversation has started. Let’s keep it going.

04/06/2026

Our interview with Dr Chris Bagley is really making waves.

Chris is an educational psychologist who looks at the impact of our school system on young people - and how it sets up too many of them to fail. He says that we need to stop blaming their brains and start asking challenging questions about the way that we educate our children.

His interview with myself and Danielle Drinkwater has one of the highest first-day-downloads of any of our episodes. Listen for yourself to find out why.

https://open.substack.com/pub/neurosense/p/blaming-childrens-brains-for-the?r=kutxq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

04/06/2026

That's not a coincidence, it's the result of a system built around a male default. Autistic girls are more likely to mask, to internalise, to be told they're "just anxious" or "too sensitive." And so they go unrecognised, unsupported, and unheard, often for many years into adulthood.

Behind this statistic are real girls who spent their childhoods not understanding why the world felt so hard, and not having the language to explain it.
Early identification matters. Belief matters. And so does building a world where autistic girls don't have to fight so hard just to be seen.

Find out more about our work and free resources over on our website.

04/06/2026

💫

A message for your child.

💡 @‌consciousconversations__

03/06/2026

Sharing as this is our local authority 🙈

The parents of a child with special needs borrowed money to pay for his educational support after West Sussex County Council failed to do so for more than nine months, an ombudsman has found.

More here: https://bbc.in/43HOTSB

02/06/2026

Recent study: "For a lot of children, the barrier is not the academic side of school at all. The environment is genuinely too much for their body to handle all day."

This is a qualitative research study that was recently published in the journal Research in Neurodiversity by Chloe Fielding, Mary Hanley, and Deborah Riby at Durham University in the UK.
Qualitative means they were after people's stories and experiences in their own words, not numbers or statistics as the main focus.

They did include a few questionnaire scores to describe their participants, but the heart of the study is interviews.

WHAT THEY WANTED TO ANSWER

The researchers were looking to better understand the experiences of parents and caregivers of neurodivergent children (autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, and so on) whose kids were struggling to attend school because of the emotional distress it causes them.

The paper uses the term "school distress" rather than "school refusal" or "avoidance," because that framing puts the problem with the school system instead of blaming the child or family.

Two specific questions guided the study: what insights do parents have about their child's school distress and attendance difficulties, and how do parents themselves experience all of this?

The authors note this was the first UK study to interview parents about this specific topic.

HOW THEY DID IT

They interviewed 44 parents and carergivers (who between them were talking about 47 children aged 5 to 16). Participants were recruited through social media and relevant organizations. Before the interviews, parents filled out an online questionnaire and three standardized measures of anxiety, sensory differences, and demand avoidance.

The interviews were semi-structured and done online over Microsoft Teams, so parents could go in whatever direction felt important to them.

The team then used a method called reflexive thematic analysis to find patterns across all the interviews and group them into themes.

The research team was itself neurodivergent, and a parent of a neurodivergent child helped design the study.

WHAT THEY FOUND

The questionnaire scores showed the children were, on average, highly anxious, had significant sensory differences, and that just under 40% showed traits of demand avoidance.

From the interviews, four main themes emerged:

• Misalignment between mainstream demands
and neurodivergent needs. Parents felt the system is "one-size-fits-all" and compliance-based, designed for neurotypical children, and that it integrates neurodivergent kids without truly including them.

• A fragile and dysfunctional support system. Support was slow, hard to access, short-lived, and inconsistent. Parents felt professionals lacked understanding (especially about masking), and many felt blamed, disbelieved, or dismissed when they raised concerns.

• Distress takes over families' lives. The impact spread far beyond school. Parents described meltdowns, self-harm, and suicidal feelings in their children, plus major effects on their own mental health, careers, and finances. Many took on extra roles as carer, advocate, researcher, and teacher.

• Driving change: what do we want from our children's education? Parents wanted both small immediate fixes (uniform flexibility, quiet spaces, trusted adults) and bigger system-level reform toward flexible, person-centered, child-led education.

AUTHOR CONCLUSIONS

The authors concluded that the UK education system does not meet the needs of neurodivergent learners, and that without proper support, both children and their whole families are heavily affected.

They argued that genuinely including neurodivergent pupils requires both quick school-level adjustments and longer-term reform of the system, with more focus on wellbeing rather than attendance and achievement alone.

STRENGTHS

This is a large sample for a qualitative study of this kind (44 parents is substantial for interview research), and the first UK study to focus specifically on parents' experiences of this issue. The use of standardized questionnaires gave useful context about the children. The team built in strong reflexivity practices, included a neurodivergent perspective on the team, involved a parent in the study design, and checked their themes with a wider group of neurodiverse researchers.

LIMITATIONS

The authors are upfront about several limitations in the research. The sample was 95% mothers (42 of 44), so it does not really capture fathers' views. Additionally, recruiting through social media and advocacy organizations may have reached parents who are already engaged in support networks, missing those who are not.

Most of the children were autistic, which may reflect recruitment bias rather than the full range of neurodivergence. Parents who found it too hard to talk about these painful topics may have opted out entirely.

Although the study was framed around mainstream schools, some parents discussed other settings (the authors note this actually added useful context). They also point out that staff voices were not included and should be explored in future research.

OUR THOUGHTS

Throughout these interviews, sensory differences came up over and over again. Kids scored high on sensory measures, and when parents described the moments things fell apart, they were usually sensory. They mentioned things like the noise of the dining hall, the smell of the bathrooms, a building that never stops being busy.

For a lot of children, the barrier is not the academic side of school at all. The environment is genuinely too much for their body to handle all day.

Also, the parents were not asking for miracles. They wanted staff who understood masking, support that lasted longer than a few weeks, and people who believed them the first time they raised a concern instead of after everything fell apart. That genuinely should not be too much to ask for.

Its abundantly clear here that when support is missing, there is more school distress and that distress doesnt stay at school.. it bleeds into home and family life, and parents end up carrying roles they were never meant to carry by themselves.

The cost of getting this wrong is heavy for so many families.

Although this is a UK study, the mismatch between how schools are built and how neurodivergent kids are wired shows up everywhere.

We're curious... Where are you located, and what has your experience with school been like? Is it similar to these UK families, or different?

29/04/2026

Great post, if children need to doodle or fidget when learning please let them ✔️
Credit Pete Wharmby, Autistic Author

27/04/2026

"If we want to improve attendance, we need to move away from a narrative that centres blame and towards one that reflects the complexity of what is happening. School absence, particularly when it is persistent, is often a signal that a child is struggling. Responding to that signal requires understanding, flexibility and the right support"

The public conversation around school absence has become increasingly blunt.