I am eight years old when small pebbles of dread begin to lodge themselves in my stomach. I do not yet have powers of observation to understand why this is happening whenever I am at school. At first, I barely notice as they steadily accumulate. But soon, they press upon me from inside, a real physical pain that has its genesis entirely in my own head.
My brain does not work the way most do. For each of the rooms I am in, the people I am around, and the roles I inhabit, I study their implicit rules, decoding them as though they were written in a foreign alphabet. Scripts are internalised, until I can barely tell where my self ends and my outside persona begins. This charade of belonging compels my unremitting vigilance. Yet daily life has the unnerving tendency to run off-book, so I must also improvise: what might my character do next? What would she be expected to say? I am only too aware that my performance is imperfect.
I have spent my life learning to be as many different selves as the world demanded of me, long before I was old enough to realise what I was doing. I have reaped the rewards of tacit social acceptance, but it is a costly exercise – not only in energy and concentration but also the less palpable grief of being untethered from who I actually am. I never made an active choice to change myself to fit the world around me; it was simply the price of existing in spaces outside my own home in Queensland, Australia. I discovered only two years ago that what I have practised since I was a child is called masking: an involuntary habit of suppressing and concealing neurodivergent behaviours in order to prevent social exclusion or censure. I am Autistic.
To be Autistic is to live in a world that was not built for you and which mandates your adaptation. Nowhere is this more acute than in educational institutions. At a mainstream school, a young neurodivergent person learns quickly that they cannot show all parts of themselves to their peers, or even to their teachers, without judgment. Hyper-enthusiasm for the things you care about is disdained. Eye contact and friendly facial expressions are obligatory. Stimming – repetitive, self-soothing mannerisms that might include rocking back and forth, tapping fingers or jiggling your foot – is admonished. People often don’t mean precisely what they say; in fact, sometimes they might mean the exact opposite. Candour is misinterpreted. Friendships follow rules you haven’t learned. Trust fades. Over time, the unerring sense of dislocation from those around you only intensifies, and acceptance of your own fundamental shortcomings deepens. The self begins to fracture: the public façade and the private identity.
The right to education is premised on the concept of substantive equality: the understanding that appropriate schooling will look different for different groups of people, based on their unique needs as learners. Under Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), an inclusive education system is a fundamental obligation of state parties, meaning that those with disabilities (including Autism, ADHD or other learning differences) should be able to ‘receive the support required, within the general education system, to facilitate their effective education’. Moreover, grounded in the social model of disability, disadvantage is understood to be rooted not in ‘problems’ within disabled people themselves but in hostile environmental conditions. For neurodivergent students, this means securing an educational environment that sees them as whole human beings, not people who are considered ‘less than’ their neurotypical peers. Yet within conventional schools, the necessary accommodations required for Autistic learners are liable to be perceived as burdensome by teachers with already unmanageable workloads. Due to these structural challenges, neurodivergent young people risk being labelled in the language of deficit, rather than difference, reinforcing damaging stereotypes.
Educators and policymakers recognise that neurodivergent learners have specific pedagogical and developmental needs that are poorly catered to within most mainstream schools, due to a lack of appropriate training and under-resourcing in an overburdened institutional context. However, under the CRPD, the goal of ‘full inclusion’ mandates that neurodivergent learners should be integrated within mainstream classroom environments, with reasonable accommodations made to cater to their individual requirements (Article 24 (2)(c)). As elaborated in General Comment 4 on the CRPD, segregated learning environments – for instance, schools that cater specifically to students with Autism or other specific learning difficulties, such as LVS Oxford and The Unicorn School, respectively (two examples from the city where I now live and work) – breach the state’s obligation to promote full inclusion. The rationale behind this stance is the understandable fear of othering and educational inequality that could arise if disabled students – including neurodivergent young people – were compulsorily confined to ‘special schools’, just as they were for centuries institutionalised under deplorable conditions.
Mandatory integration of neurodivergent students places them in an environment not adapted to their needs
The CRPD remains a ground-breaking milestone in the journey towards disability rights, and in many cases Article 24 has offered critical protections to vulnerable groups at risk of total exclusion from education. Its championing of inclusive education and non-discrimination is needed as much as ever in a social landscape in which many states are witnessing the regression of diversity and inclusion policies. Though its enforceability varies – for instance, the CRPD has been fully ratified by Australia and the European Union, while in the UK it can only be referenced by domestic courts rather than offering binding protections – the Convention is valuable both as an ideological commitment and an enforceable code. It has proven instrumental in creating strategic plans for integrated and inclusive education in places such as Ghana, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Tanzania, and countries including Canada and New Zealand have made changes to teacher-training curricula to align with inclusive schooling.
Yet, while well-intentioned, the CRPD’s paternalistic regulatory response is in some contexts an unwelcome overreaction to previous generations’ exclusion of disabled learners from the classroom. By discouraging the provision of specialised schools for children with particular disabilities, the mandatory integration of neurodivergent students in mainstream schools places many young people in an environment that is not adapted to their sensory and learning needs, creating a significant risk of developmental harm and repercussions for mental health.
In my own case, the internalised stressors of long-term, undiagnosed Autistic masking resulted in chronic physical illness, stopping me from being able to eat and from being able to leave my home. I had no idea why my body was enraged with me, and received only the standard diagnosis of anxiety disorder from medical specialists. The possibility of Autism was never considered, despite clear indications of converging symptoms. By the time I was 14 and in my final year of secondary school, I was able to attend only a handful of days on campus in order to sit exams, completing the rest of my assignments from home and teaching myself the curriculum. This period of profound social and intellectual isolation lasted for almost five years, continuing well into my tertiary education. Later, my stress-induced illnesses would metamorphose into debilitating migraine and depression.
In spite of these experiences, my life has not been unhappy or unfulfilling. For all the obstacles, I have found enriching friendships, intellectual stimulation, and an invaluable sense of community. My days are filled with intense and enthusiastic immersion in the activities that mean most to me, which Julia Bascom called The Obsessive Joy of Autism (2015). Like so many others, I was, however, deeply failed by an educational system that – for all its inclusive rhetoric – abhors difference and does not know how to identify or respond to neurodivergence.
Neurodivergence is the term used to represent ways of thinking and being in the world that fall outside the ‘neurotypical’ norm. It encompasses not only Autism but a wide range of different cognitive styles, including ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, intellectual disability, and mental health conditions that affect how the mind functions. Comprising as much as a fifth of the global population – though still significantly underdiagnosed among less privileged populations – it has been speculated that neurodivergence plays an important role in evolutionary adaptation, having enabled our species to respond favourably to changing environmental conditions. The proportion of people who are neurodivergent is not growing, but rather we are only now beginning to recognise and diagnose neurodivergence appropriately. In the context of education, varied expressions of neurodivergence are impacted to differing extents by integration in the mainstream classroom, and it is critical that agency over schooling decisions remains the prerogative of the neurodivergent learners themselves. However, my argument that ostensibly ‘inclusive’ schooling is often profoundly exclusionary in practice applies equally to other forms of neurodivergence as much as to Autism.
Although the potential for specialised learning environments to become a ‘dumping ground’ for non-neurotypical students is a valid concern, it needs to be addressed not by mandating compulsory integration, but instead by offering young people and their families a choice among the learning environments that are best suited to the student’s individual needs. There is a salient difference between removing disabled learners into ‘special schools’ because they are too difficult to accommodate in the mainstream classroom, and purposely designing alternative educational environments that are differentiated for the unique needs of specific groups.
A genuinely inclusive education system demands careful attention to the voices of the neurodivergent community
As a point of comparison, schools for Deaf children provide for that specific disability, making the use of sign language a norm, rather than forcing individual Deaf students to adapt to a hearing classroom. At the same time, those who wish to remain in mainstream schools equally have the right to that form of educational inclusion, should they so choose. In this way, supporting specialist schools for distinct types of neurodivergence does not mean that neurodivergent learners will be forcibly excluded from the mainstream classroom; rather, it empowers them to make agentic choices about their own needs and educational experiences, without policymakers paternalistically deciding on their behalf. Within the diverse Autistic community, it is the individual who is best placed to determine their own preferences, and who also has the prerogative to change their mind over time.
Despite the CRPD’s laudable intention of de-stigmatising and de-segregating those with disabilities, it overlooks the realities of how the education system actually operates in context. Instead, a genuinely inclusive education system demands that careful attention be paid to the voices of neurodivergent young people and the wider neurodivergent community. Key to this is understanding that an approach that explicitly proscribes any opportunity for specialised learning environments also curtails critical opportunities to build community: learning is a relational process, and caring relationships between students and teachers, as well as between peers, have a demonstrable impact on wellbeing, engagement and educational outcomes. This is especially significant because neurodivergent students are at increased risk of ostracisation by neurotypical peers due to differences in social behaviour and communication styles. Targeted schools for neurodivergence thus have the unique potential to facilitate collective unmasking and to become spaces in which neurodivergence is genuinely celebrated.
Seven years ago, before I had the language to describe my undiagnosed neurodivergence, I became a secondary school teacher in a boarding school in regional Australia. At least part of my motivation was based on the vague understanding of all that my own education had lacked, and what I hoped could be different for other children who fell outside the norm. As a teacher, I experienced first-hand the challenge of inclusive education amid insurmountable time constraints: of providing each student with the differentiated resources, stimulation and support to fulfil their unique potential. I failed to meet this ideal on a daily basis. Acutely aware of my ignorance and insufficiency, I had only the haziest idea of what I might do differently. Moreover, as an undiagnosed Autistic adult, I was permanently perched on the threshold of burnout, as I had neither the knowledge nor resources to cater to my own unidentified support needs as a neurodivergent classroom teacher. Intermittently, I would become physically unwell for a week at a time with no obvious cause, before the cycle of exhaustion would begin again.
In my studies to become a teacher, there had been significantly more focus on behavioural management strategies than on catering to difference among learners: it is far easier to inculcate compliance than to truly know your students. Even in a school such as mine – with the considerable advantages of small class sizes, an intensely individualised ethos of curriculum delivery, and rigorous expectations of teacher involvement in all facets of classroom and boarding life – there was never enough time to provide as I would have wished for each of my students’ specific needs. This was particularly the case when it came to students with learning differences and disabilities, and those poised at the twice-exceptional juncture of giftedness and neurodivergence. To provide these students with enrichment, challenge and stimulation is a specialist exercise; to presume this of classroom teachers is like expecting your GP to be a cardiologist, neurosurgeon or psychiatrist. The result is not only frustrating from the students’ perspective, but deeply demoralising for teaching staff also.
Neurodivergence demands that schools have a deep and nuanced understanding of what inclusive teaching looks like in practice, in order to provide adequately for students’ pedagogical and developmental needs and thus meet the threshold of Article 24 of the CRPD. In the context of Autism, this also includes better awareness of how to identify masking among neurodivergent students, and understanding what Autism looks like, beyond the boy-savant stereotype. Neither limited school resources nor teacher training provide adequately for such professional development.
A most powerful strategy for supporting neurodivergent students in school is modelling unmasking myself
Supporting neurodivergent learners also requires a myriad of practical and logistical changes: these are not merely student whims, but concrete impediments to their cognitive processing and emotional regulation. Sensory sensitivities are often acute in neurodivergent people: trying to learn in an environment with constant intermittent background noise can be a major obstacle to concentration. Bright lights, fluorescent fittings and glare make it impossible for many Autistic students to focus on their learning, as do tactile issues with uncomfortable school uniforms or classrooms with unusual smells and fluctuating temperatures. Compulsory eye contact and maintaining the neurotypical appearance of engagement is a cumulative strain. Regular changes to seating plans, timetabled rooms and class schedules all invite anxiety. Likewise, policing students’ bodies by forbidding stims – being told not to ‘fiddle’ – robs learners of important self-management strategies. Group work requires intense focus on social dynamics and interactions, closely monitoring the behavioural codes that govern conversational exchanges, to the detriment of learning. Moreover, when the neurotypical mask inevitably slips, students are liable to face bullying or alienation from their peers.
Mainstream schools are not equipped to meet these critical sensory and pedagogical needs, nor are teachers provided with the time and resources to invest in genuinely understanding neurodivergence and what it means for learning: ie, focusing not only on the challenges but recognising the profound potential in seeing the world through a different paradigm. I now recognise that one of the most powerful strategies for supporting neurodivergent students in school – whether or not they have received a formal diagnosis yet – is modelling unmasking myself, enabling young people to feel safe enough that they too can be their true selves in the learning environment. For me, this might look like talking quicker or louder than normal when I become enthused about a topic, speaking with less eye contact and more exuberant gestures, even bouncing around the classroom because movement helps me to focus my thoughts.
Enabling unmasking relies not only on a school-wide teacher commitment to embracing difference, but also on the maturity and empathy of every student in every classroom. As my own teaching experiences have taught me, it is the kind of systemic, cultural change that might take generations to achieve. Pragmatically, we know that mainstream schools are not designed for Autistic or neurodivergent learners: what we need is a space that doesn’t merely accept or tolerate difference, but that actively embraces it. Moreover, under the CRPD, this is a fundamental entitlement to which every neurodivergent student is explicitly entitled as a component of their right to inclusive education and substantive equality. Even curtailed by the misguided proscriptions of General Comment 4, it is this core of inclusivity that most strongly characterises the universal right to education, substantiating the need for targeted, specialist teaching for neurodivergent young people.
To build this kind of educational environment, there are some core principles for teaching neurodivergent students, including understanding that learning is embodied, adopting a strengths-based pedagogy, and promoting self-understanding and agency. In a neurodiversity-affirming classroom, these principles are synergetic and consistently reinforce one another. For instance, we know that Autistic people have incredible potential for empathy and creativity – indeed, being intensely affected by the emotions and experiences of other people is a reason many Autistic individuals need time to recalibrate following social situations. Early studies claiming that Autistic people universally lack empathy have been questioned for inconsistency and reliability in recent years, and we now recognise that ‘hyper-empathy’ is commonly observed among Autistic people, particularly within demographics that have been historically underdiagnosed.
We also know that the Autistic characteristics of hyperfocus and monotropism can lead to extraordinary ‘flow states’ of learning and discovery, which are a reprieve from habitual sensory overwhelm and disorientation. It is exactly this degree of focus to which we owe many of society’s greatest creative and intellectual breakthroughs: Emily Dickinson’s reclusive habits and devotion to her rich inner world fuelled the pathbreaking poetry she produced, in the same way that Mozart’s prolific compositions were the result of a life of single-minded focus on music. Although posthumous diagnosis is neither a particularly useful nor a viable endeavour, the value of monotropic concentration and cognitive immersion can be readily demonstrated in the lives of historical innovators.
By making learning explicitly meaningful to Autistic students – connecting it with its wider context, or relating it to one’s special interests – we can activate this exceptionally generative potential for curiosity, resilience and persistence in mastering new topics. Yet creating such a sense of ownership over one’s learning demands a level of flexibility from the classroom environment, enabling students to engage in task-immersion without the constant disruption of timetables, social expectations or hostile sensory stimuli. This means according students a degree of independence and autonomy with which the mainstream schooling system is often uncomfortable. Rather than fighting to suppress a neurodivergent student’s ‘attention tunnel’ – meaning the intense application of all their cognitive resources on a single subject – we need to work with it, understanding the cognitive burden of task-switching and appreciating the power of their intense interests. Framing these traits in the language of strengths rather than deficits opens up new possibilities for imagining futures of Autistic flourishing in education, and for potential co-design of curricular programmes with young people themselves.
Of course, these approaches are accessible to neurodivergent people only when they are in a space that feels fundamentally safe, and in which they can trust themselves and the people around them to let down their neurotypical ‘mask’ without fear of repercussions. Key to making a learning environment safe is to affirm that neurodiversity is the rule and not the exception, integrating inclusivity as a core principle of the education system and not merely a stroke of rhetoric: unless a space has a majority of neurodivergent learners, it is difficult to challenge the invisibility of neurotypical norms.
One powerful exemplar from my own teaching life is of an extracurricular interdisciplinary philosophy group I developed, which learners self-elected to join in small groups of six to eight students per year level. Without explicitly intending to do so, I now see that I cultivated an educational space that privileged neurodivergent cognitive styles, rather than replicating the usual classroom environment. While not all the students were neurodivergent, each of the members of the group seemed to ‘unmask’ school-learned behaviours in a way I hadn’t before witnessed. It was this experience that demonstrated to me most clearly that learning is a relational phenomenon, premised on emotional safety, knowledge co-creation, and effacing the conventional teacher-led hierarchy. It also bears noting that in having self-elected to be part of this small group, the students manifested a degree of reciprocal openness towards one another that felt quite distinct from the way they interacted in the regular classroom.
Not simply ‘neurodivergent-friendly’, we collaborated on a different pedagogical paradigm altogether
The structure of our weekly meeting was fluid and student-led, so that running the same programme with two different year groups produced entirely different results. In a small discussion circle, we embarked on a shared effort of enquiry, often entering into a collective ‘flow’ state. Without meaning to radically invert classroom norms, an egalitarian culture developed, enabled by a flexible ‘lesson plan’ that was simply a handout of ideas that served as a jumping-off point for discussion. Accommodating different types of cognitive processing in this way, the handouts were a learning aid as much for myself as for the students present, who at times would ask to instead represent their ideas visually on the whiteboard when contributing to our discussions. Free of the proscriptive rules necessary for maintaining authority in a larger classroom, students implicitly understood that the usual terms of engagement within school did not apply: they were free to wander around the room while thinking, listening or speaking, and they could see that enthusiastic emotional responses to our discussion – including my own – were always welcome. I remember distinctly that my own hand gestures and expressions became less inhibited, and I didn’t feel the same need to suppress mannerisms or force eye contact that I usually did when teaching. The flow of conversation was decentralised, and much of our learning was derived from personal experience and how a topic resonated in our own lives.
These practices had developed organically rather than strategically, and in hindsight I recognise that this was largely facilitated by my own unconscious unmasking in a safe environment, mirrored by that of the students. Though unintentionally, this space upheld the core principles of neurodiversity-affirming pedagogy, through a deeply personal, embodied, agentic and self-referential approach to finding meaning in our shared learning experience. Unprompted, a number of students would undertake their own ‘projects’ based on the content of our weekly discussions, and bring these to present at the next meeting: imagined dialogues between different philosophers, allegorical representations of intellectual movements, or artistic renderings of key historical scenes. At the time, each of us sensed how different this was from the regular school day, a palpable reminder of what inclusivity in education could actually feel like. Not simply ‘neurodivergent-friendly’, we were collaborating on a different pedagogical paradigm altogether, in a way that I know would have felt deeply uncomfortable to many of my neurotypical teaching colleagues. And yet, this same discomfort was exactly what I experienced in the neurotypical school context to which I had to adapt on a daily basis.
Although the pressure to mask affects all of us to a degree, and never more so than during adolescence, its incidence and severity among neurodivergent people is exceptional. To establish educational spaces in which unmasking is welcomed and encouraged is thus not only a preference, but a human right that is derived from the universal entitlement to substantive equality in education for people with disabilities. In the same way that schools for Deaf learners are able to operate on a presumption of shared communication through sign language, which mainstream schools are unable to accommodate, so too do Autistic students deserve a learning environment in which their needs are accommodated as the norm, rather than a cumbersome exception. Enabling learners to unmask facilitates healthy social, intellectual and creative development, validating cognitive differences in ways mainstream schools do not. In addition, Autistic friendship styles can differ from those of neurotypical people, meaning that opportunities to meet, socialise and unmask with other neurodivergent students are important.
Critically, it is no coincidence that the kinds of camouflaging behaviours I have described – and the damage they inflict – are most likely to affect Autistic people with less social privilege, and thus less latitude for making a behavioural misstep. The CRPD and General Comment 4 fail to appreciate this uneven pressure. As such, the CRPD’s mandate creates a real risk of intersectional discrimination among learners, because a flawed conception of ‘inclusivity’ disproportionately affects the most vulnerable neurodivergent young people. This includes not just women and girls, but also people of colour, the queer community and gender non-conforming people, linguistic minorities, Indigenous peoples, and those with additional physical or intellectual disabilities, among others. It follows that these groups are also least likely to obtain a formal diagnosis of Autism (or any other kind of neurodivergence). This is not only due to masking, but because Autism persists in being mythologised as the white, middle-class boy savant, an idea consistently reinforced by the press, as well as film and television. If the medical establishment is not looking for Autism in certain groups of people, it will not find it – especially when those people are working so hard to appear neurotypical.
Neurodiversity-affirming teaching remains inaccessible in almost all mainstream schools, in spite of the rhetoric
In this context, arguments that neurodivergent people need to practise adapting to a neurotypical world reveal an underlying assumption that they are not already doing so on a daily basis, as well as an ableist presumption that it is the individual who must change rather than discriminatory social conditions. Premised on the medical model of disability, which pathologises all those outside a preconceived norm, the fear that specialist schools would make it more difficult for Autistic students to integrate into society fails to recognise that specialist schools represent the only place where a neurodivergent person can fully embrace their cognitive differences, rather than seeing them as a problem to be overcome. This kind of affirmation is especially impactful for the most marginalised members of the Autistic community.
A disability rights-informed approach to education – substantiated by the CRPD under Article 24 – demands that inclusivity and substantive equality take account of intersectional oppression and its inherent relationship to masking. As such, we must recognise that neurodiversity-affirming teaching remains inaccessible in almost all mainstream schools, in spite of the rhetoric of differentiation and inclusivity. Though we should indeed remain alive to the need to change the culture of the wider education system, it is inconsistent with the right to education that neurodivergent young people be compulsorily subjected to an institutional environment that we know puts them at catastrophic risk of harm.
Two years ago, my mother was diagnosed with Autism, sparking the chain of research and investigation that would lead to the discovery of my own neurodivergent identity. But late diagnosis – in her case, not until her sixth decade – is its own kind of grief. To commit my experiences to paper is to engage in a kind of reconciliation, reckoning with the fractured selves, the deeply internalised stigma, and the gaps in how I have always told my story. I am incredibly lucky to have found a tribe of my own, many of whom share in neurodivergence and who too have grown up believing that they were the problem, and not the world around them. What I hope for is a future that will not inflict this same dislocation on other beautiful, atypical minds.
There is a room with high walls of books lit by a westward sun on a chilly August afternoon some years since, peopled by a small but colourful collection of young people. Infectious chatter, unbridled curiosity, and a complete disavowal of convention. Questions upon questions: very few solid answers. But that is beside the point, which is simply to ask, to care, to learn in our diverse togetherness.
