Part 5: Support That Can Be Withdrawn Is Not Support.
“When breaktime is treated as a reward for blind compliance and taken away as a consequence of neurodiversity.”
My child didn’t melt down in class.
He didn’t scream.
He didn’t throw chairs.
He slid a water bottle across a table.
Quietly.
To cope.
And that’s the part people don’t understand about SEND children. Especially the ones with ADHD, PDA, sensory differences, or high masking skills.
The system doesn’t respond to distress.
It responds to disruption.
If a child is compliant, verbal, or polite, their suffering is invisible.
Until it isn’t.
I was told my child would have movement breaks.
Timetabled.
Agreed.
Necessary for regulation and safety.
And then I was told something else, in the same breath:
Teachers would still have the power to remove things if they deemed behaviour warranted it.
Read that again.
Support but conditional.
Regulation but revocable.
Access but only while convenient.
That’s not inclusion.
“Neurodiversity cannot be consequence out of a child”
That’s control dressed up as care.
Movement for my child is not a reward.
It is not an incentive.
It is not something you earn by being “good”.
It is how his nervous system works.
Removing it doesn’t teach him anything.
It dysregulates him.
It makes him less safe.
And when it happens quietly, without drama, no one notices except the child absorbing it into their body.
This is how harm hides in plain sight.
I was told staff use evidence-based approaches.
That they receive training.
That they apply judgement with flexibility.
But judgement without specific neurodiversity training is not expertise.
It’s guesswork.
And when support depends on individual interpretation on which adult is present, on how behaviour is perceived in the moment disabled children lose consistency.
SEND law exists because good intentions aren’t enough.
I was told details of staff training couldn’t be shared.
That data protection prevented transparency.
Let’s be honest.
Asking whether adults understand neurodivergent regulation is not intrusive.
Wanting assurance that decisions won’t cause harm is not unreasonable.
When systems say “trust us” but won’t show you how they work, that’s not partnership.
That’s power.
A timetable was shared.
Breaks were written down.
But timetables don’t show what happens when a child is already overwhelmed.
They don’t show whether support is protected or paused.
They don’t show what happens before a child starts hurting themselves.
Paper plans don’t keep children safe.
People do.
And only when those people are trained, consistent, and accountable.
Every school says they want children to succeed.
But success for a SEND child is not silence.
It’s not compliance.
It’s not sitting still at the cost of mental health.
Success is safety.
Understanding.
Needs met early: not after harm appears.
My child should not have had to bite his own arm, loose sleep, and be pushed beyond his nervous system limits before support was taken seriously.
And I will not be grateful for the bare minimum he is legally entitled to.
I will no longer accept: Support that can be withdrawn.
Policies that quietly override SEND law.
Regulation needs treated as optional.
Safeguarding reframed as behaviour management.
I don’t need reassurance.
I need safeguards.
I don’t need collaboration if it requires my child to absorb harm in silence.
If a child has to hurt themselves before the system responds,
the system isn’t broken.
It’s working exactly as designed.
And that’s why parents speak.
Come back next week, in Part 6, I’m writing about what happens when Silence becomes the strategy. When you stop explaining. Stop justifying. Stop begging systems to hear what they’re actively choosing to ignore.
Silence isn’t giving up.
It’s choosing where your energy goes when you’ve already said enough.
If this post hit you in the chest, made you nod, swear, cry, or quietly whisper “oh my god, yes” then please know this: writing this takes time, emotional skin, and a ridiculous amount of nervous system recovery afterwards.
If you’re able, hit the Buy Me a Coffee button. Think of it less as coffee and more as: therapy I haven’t booked yet, the emotional labour tax, a small “I see you, keep going” from one exhausted human to another. And if you can’t? Thats okay too. Come back next Friday.
I’ll be quite until then. And that’s when it gets really loud.
Love,
Diane x
PS: Still figuring it out, still winging it. Still affected by the very real possibility that an academy behaviour policy can be enforced in ways that override SEND law.