Our diverse togetherness

While initiatives for inclusive education mean well,

schools fail to provide neurodivergent students
what they need to flourish

by Chelsea Wallis

Chelsea Wallis is a doctoral candidate in law at the University of Oxford. She works
with Queen’s College, University of Melbourne on improving neurodivergent
inclusivity in academic spaces. Her writing has appeared in Amicus Curiae, The Turl,
and Cultivate.

Edited by Christian Jarrett

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.

T he 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.
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.

N eurodivergence 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.

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.

S even 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.

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.

O f 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.

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.

A lthough 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.

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.

T wo 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.
aeon.co 30 May 2025