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I’m writing this sitting next to my son, waiting for him to fall asleep. He’s three years old and has recently been diagnosed as autistic. It often takes him ages to drift off.

I’m sure plenty of knowledgeable people will be nodding in recognition.

“Ah yes,” they will say, “this is very common for children with autism.”

To be honest, the overconfidence of such statements infuriates me.

I’ve taught for two-and-a-half decades, including one decade working with students with a variety of special educational and mental health needs in alternative provision. I also have a doctorate in the philosophy of teaching students with special needs.

Yet after all this, I have less faith than ever in our understanding of - and approach to - SEND.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t keen on getting my son diagnosed.

His nursery teachers called us in for a meeting to express their concerns, which largely seemed to be that he didn’t want to talk to or interact with anyone, showed no interest in any activities and just wanted to do his own thing.

My reaction was to shrug my shoulders.

Do we need a SEND diagnosis?

I couldn’t quite understand what the problem was. When I told my friends, they laughed and pointed out that this might be because the teachers’ descriptions of my son’s “issues” perfectly described me.

My wife was convinced we should investigate a diagnosis. She thought there would be experts out there who could help him.

My experience, on the other hand, meant that I questioned the usefulness of a diagnosis, and the help it would lead to.

This wasn’t because I’m cynical, but because I was, in a previous life, the person who was meant to be doing such helping - and I’m well aware of how little help I actually was.

This is partly because the firm answers and silver bullets that everyone imagines come with a diagnosis mostly don’t exist.

We don’t really know what causes autism, just as we don’t really know what causes many other special educational needs. Ask 50 different professors or autistic people “what is autism?” and you’ll probably get 50 different answers.

The truth is, my autistic son isn’t really any harder to care for than his older brother or his younger sister. Sure, I don’t really get his games, his obsession with rocks has damaged the floor a bit and his endlessly repeating questions can be annoying when I’m driving.

But he is very funny. He is like a surrealist artist. For a while, he used to carry around a potato, even going to sleep with it. I have a lovely video of him cradling the potato and singing Silent Night to it at Christmastime.

As I see it, much of the issue is that he’s just very eccentric. And my main reason for not wanting him diagnosed was my fear that the diagnosis would rob him of ownership over his own personality.
Rather than enjoying his company and bizarre behaviour, people will now whisper explanations of his choices: “You do know he’s autistic, don’t you?”

His eccentricity will become just another symptom. He won’t be allowed reasons for being annoyed; only causes of his “flare-ups”.

Labels provide relief for some

Don’t get me wrong, I am not entirely against diagnoses and labels - I am well aware of how important they can be. I know parents who were having a terrible time, beating themselves up, thinking that the behaviour of their child was because they were doing something wrong, and it was an enormous relief for them to realise that it wasn’t their fault.

Similarly, I know of children who suddenly felt vindicated and understood (by others and themselves) for the first time in their lives after receiving a diagnosis.

When I ran a centre for children who weren’t coping in mainstream schools, we would often advise parents to get their children diagnosed with various things if we thought they could.

Firstly, because this unlocked a lot of benefits, and secondly, because it made it clear to others that some of their “problematic” behaviour wasn’t always entirely voluntary, or that there were good reasons for them behaving as they did.

I saw children sink deeper into depression, academic failure and crime because they were being blamed for things that weren’t their fault. I remember a child with undiagnosed Tourette’s gradually being excluded from different parts of society: this bus route, then all bus routes; this shop, then the whole mall; this class, then all classes.

And don’t get me wrong, there are times when I want to tell everyone on the bus that my son is autistic, “so please don’t tut and stare”. I’ve gotten righteously angry at strangers mocking his behaviour. I’ve wanted to tell the other parents that the reason he won’t play with their child is “because he’s autistic”.

But at the same time, I worry that labels can often hide other causes that are, in principle, solvable.

For example, a child in a pupil referral unit where I used to work was diagnosed with ADHD, and yet his diet was appalling. He came into school drinking energy drinks and never ate fruit or vegetables. So is it ADHD, a bad diet or the fact that the child slept on a sofa - or maybe didn’t sleep at all?

Perhaps there are even physiological causes. Viral infections have been linked to ; neuronal antibody production to ; and after infection to mood, cognitive and behaviour changes.

The fact is, schools can’t change the food a child has access to at home or get them a bed. But what we can do is give them a label and try some strategies.

The question is, to what extent does a SEND label actually just mask other issues within our society and within education?

It’s not the child - it’s the system

When free education for “all” was introduced with the Butler Act of 1944, section 57 excluded from the definition of “all” children those who were “suffering from a disability of mind of such a nature or to such an extent as to make him incapable of receiving education at school”.

This abomination was repealed in 1970, and the Warnock Inquiry was then set up to support local education authorities struggling with the new expanded definition of “all”.

Unfortunately, the inquiry failed to correct the problem at its root because it accepted the original misdiagnosis: it accepted that the problem was the degree to which a child is capable of being educated, not the degree to which the educator is capable of educating the child.

It was never the children who had special needs who were the problem; it was the education system itself. And this situation was further compounded by the introduction of league tables and the consequent quantification of outcomes.

The cultivation of a competitive, zero-sum notion of education has had some curious side effects within the world of SEND. Rather than recognising that the means of measurement (eg, exam grades) are nonsense, students with SEND are given various forms of artificial advantage, creating a certain market value for SEND labels.

Again, this is not inherently a bad thing, in that it has perhaps helped to normalise SEND. But because it is happening within a zero-sum system, the more “advantages” we give away, the less advantage they bestow on those who need it most.

Meanwhile, these “advantages” have a financial opportunity cost. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, central government funding for high needs currently totals nearly £11 billion - and this funding still doesn’t go far enough.

How often are SEND labels just shoehorns for squeezing feet into badly formed shoes? Or, to use another metaphor, the WD40 of poorly designed systems?

I once taught a student whose behaviour was so challenging that we couldn’t let her use scissors. She couldn’t last a single lesson in a mainstream school, because she couldn’t stop talking. Her language was so consistently foul that when she got annoyed, swearwords weren’t enough to express her outrage, and so she smashed her phone or banged her head against the wall.

But then she did work experience at ����Vlogco, and her new colleagues could not have given her a more glowing report. The elderly people who came in during the day loved the fact that she’d stop and chat to them.

She’s currently a successful hairdresser.

I have many stories like this. Ex-students who, despite everything, eventually found their place - somewhere they make sense. In a kitchen, on a cruise ship, in a kitchen on a cruise ship, at a mechanic’s, in a music studio, in a tattoo parlour.

Those stories give me hope for my son.

He’s now asleep. He still twitches occasionally. He’ll probably come into our room at 4am and cheerily announce that he has “stopped sleeping”.

A child isn’t born with SEND. They aren’t born knowing that they don’t fit. This is something they learn; something that they’re taught.

Somewhat ironically, our education system struggles to educate them in everything - except the fact that they struggle to educate them.

The writer is a secondary school teacher. We have withheld his name to protect his son’s identity

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