A NEW book, The Crisis in the Classroom: How the special educational needs explosion is destroying education (Luath Press, 2026), is written by Dave Clements who describes himself as having worked in local government for 30 years.
Clements is also the father of a son with autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA). He has battled to get educational support for his son, and he knows the system isn’t working for children like his, who need it the most.
However, he also smells a rat. His progressive commitments are being stretched to their limit, and as he declares towards the end of the book: ‘The urge to disengage our critical faculties because we consider ourselves progressive, or don’t want to appear unkind, isn’t going to solve the problem.’
Amen to that!
Clements recognises the genuine challenges facing schools as they try to educate increasing numbers of children with learning disabilities and behavioural problems. He has been a parent-governor at a primary school. He has seen the data on the rising numbers of children with Education Care and Health Plans (EHCPs), he knows about the scary numbers of children being suspended and excluded from school as well as the shocking numbers who never show up. He knows that inclusion is causing much pain and no gain.
Indeed, he puts it brilliantly when he says: ‘We are throwing vast sums of money at an ill-defined problem, or set of problems, faced by a rapidly growing minority of our children. And we are doing it without any evidence that is making any difference.’
Clements rightly challenges the paperwork involved in EHCPs and the need for reform, pointing out that ‘the whole exercise becomes a bureaucratic means to a financial end, rather than a deficit to be addressed’. Once you have the EHCP you rarely get the solutions you crave. We need something better. Much better, in fact.
Clements also follows his nose for that rat. He wonders out loud if people are making it up. He exposes the neuro-narcissists who try to revive their flagging careers by coming out as autistic or having ADHD. He is rightly cynical about celebrities declaring themselves to be autistic when challenged about poor behaviour. He knows there is something wrong with a society that uses labels to explain away any embarrassment or difficulty.
Thus, Clements links the special needs crisis to wider cultural changes that help to explain the explosion of ‘need’. He highlights the dangers of a therapeutic culture that encourages people to dwell on their psychological challenges and to talk (endlessly) about their mental health. He recognises that the language of neurodiversity ‘is as much a culture war on reserve, resilience and restraint as it is a discussion about the peculiar psychological dispositions associated with autism’.
Indeed, he documents how neuro-talk reinforces the ongoing effects of family breakdown, absent fathers, lack of discipline and increased welfare dependency. Children are encouraged to feel weak and defeated – to be ‘needy’. And what’s more, those in charge do the same. Clements rightly criticises the politicians and teachers who deserted their posts and embraced school closures and mask-wearing during the madness of the pandemic.
In the most worrying part of the book, Clements argues that this emergent therapeutic culture is shaping all mainstream schools. He contends that the movement to promote neurodiversity is a Trojan horse that is helping to erode behavioural and educational standards and expectations in schools. He reports on an intervention called Mentally Healthy Schools that aims to ‘embed the ideology of neurodiversity in schools’ so that ‘every classroom is neuro-diverse. Each pupil will have a different way of thinking, feeling and learning. This should be encouraged and supported’.
Similarly, the Department of Education’s Partnership for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools or PINS is all about mainstreaming support for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Teachers are encouraged to think about sensory-friendly classrooms, to introduce movement breaks, to provide individualised learning plans and divergent expectations. While this used to be done for the minority of children with an EHCP, it is now being rolled out for everyone – including all ‘neurotypes’.
Clements rightly points out that schools already have an inclusion problem whereby children with serious learning and behavioural disorders are included in mainstream schools, disrupting educational outcomes for themselves and their peers. Yet the direction of travel is to support more inclusion, to further reduce access to specialist provision and to turn every school into a special needs school. Neuro-mainstreaming is the ultimate goal.
For Clements, this is a bad way to go, and as he suggests: ‘Education shouldn’t be reorganised around . . . a small minority of pupils who may be better served in specialist schools or other settings. Trying to create ASD-friendly schools, when only a fraction of children are diagnosed with it, seems just a little disproportionate, even to this parent of an autistic child.’
Reorganising the culture of the school in line with ‘neurodiversity’ is akin to previous efforts around anti-racism, de-colonialism, pro-transgenderism or anti-masculinity. The political preoccupations of a small minority of adults are being smuggled into the classroom with devastating implications for the children involved.
Clements is right to argue that ‘there is something corrosive about the creation of a special needs culture. If some children are allowed certain privileges or can gain concessions not available to other children, however justifiable they may or may not be, it can foster resentment in their peers’.
It is likely that the classroom collective will turn on the children who are allowed out to play, or given extra time in exams, if everyone thinks they are making it up. However, while the children will challenge it, the teachers are obviously very afraid to do likewise (and Clements reports on a number of conversations with those who have concerns but can’t speak out in the staffroom).
In his final chapter, Clements asserts that ‘we can’t go on like this’. He knows that the special needs crisis is ‘as much a social and cultural phenomenon as it is a clinical or educational one’ but he doesn’t really know what to do.
He rightly wants to separate genuine needs (the ‘deserving disabled’) from those who have other reasons for attaching themselves to the group – what might be called the ‘undeserving diagnostic disaster’. He rightly calls for more specialist provision to be built for those with very high needs. He also wants a simpler system for identifying needs and having them met.
However, he also wants the adults to man-up and start taking charge. Parents need to foster a culture of self-discipline, hard work and delayed gratification. Clinicians need to exercise restraint in giving out labels that make people weak. Educational institutions need to focus on the core business of education (what an idea!).
Readers of the Autism Tribune will not be surprised to hear me say that we also need to understand what is causing autism and related neurological disorders in our young people. The numbers might be relatively small, but they are rising fast, and the research points to underlying biological dysfunction in brain development associated with immunity, gut and metabolism.
It is here that Clements has yet to fully break out of the progressive cage of his past. He dismisses those who are trying to take a biological view in just a couple of pages. He has no time for the argument that pharmaceutical drugs or vaccines might be causing the problems. He repeats the usual mantra about Andrew Wakefield and the link to the MMR being ‘debunked’ but he thereby bins the insight that will eventually get us out of the mess.
It is only when we take a clear-eyed view of what is wrong with our children that we will be able adequately to address what is shaping up to be the existential threat of our age. Even if you don’t want to sign up to the Wakefield view of the world (which despite the attacks is rather mild and polite), we need to do the kind of research he was doing so well. In my opinion, autism is a manifestation of inter-generational damage to the human immune system, and the prognosis is not looking good.
In his book, Clements rightly says that too many children today are ‘distressed, disabled, disordered and disengaged’. If we don’t change course, this will only get worse. The changes are manifest in our children’s health as well as the wider culture – and both are increasingly sick.
Clements has done a great job in asking important questions about what has gone wrong; we now need to focus our energies on finding some answers.
This article appeared in the Autism Tribune on May 7, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
