“Seeping into the court system”?!!!
That language is deeply troubling. It is also an inept assessment of our legal system. Judges don’t decide cases according to fashionable ideology. They hear evidence from qualified experts, apply the law enacted by Parliament, and reach independent judicial decisions. To suggest that proper consideration of recognised neurodevelopmental conditions is somehow “seeping” into the courts fundamentally misunderstands the judicial process. What exactly is the alternative being proposed? That judges should ignore expert medical evidence because it is inconvenient? Or because it collides with newspaper headlines?
I would call this article little more than chip paper because there is scarcely any recognition of the lived reality of children with SEND. There is little acknowledgment of sensory processing difficulties, overwhelming anxiety, executive functioning deficits, communication disorders, emotional dysregulation or the neurological differences that can profoundly affect a child’s ability to function within a conventional classroom.
Instead, the implication is that many of these children simply need stricter discipline. That is an argument which risks taking us backwards.
There was a time when children with dyslexia were dismissed as lazy. Autistic children were labelled awkward or deliberately difficult. Children with ADHD were simply called naughty. Children with speech and language disorders were punished for failing to follow instructions they could not properly understand. We have spent decades learning from clinicians, researchers, educators and, most importantly, from disabled children and their families. We should be very careful not to abandon that progress.
