In 2025, the government’s behaviour and attendance agenda promises calm, safe, and dignified schools – but for many neurodivergent pupils, “what works” in policy does not translate into belonging in practice. This article explores why behaviour cannot be reduced to compliance, how masking and refusal reveal hidden pressures, and why leadership, consistency, and high expectations must be redefined if inclusion is to be real.

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Today, the government launched a new package to tackle behaviour and attendance in schools. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson summed up the approach:

“We know what works – strong leadership, consistent attendance and schools standing shoulder to shoulder with families.”

Ambassadors Tom Bennett and Jayne Lowe echoed this with calls for dignity and belonging:

“Every child deserves a school that is safe and calm, where they can be treated with dignity – and so do all school staff.”

“All children deserve to belong in school, and I am committed to helping schools create safe, inclusive environments where they can thrive.”

Safety, dignity, belonging – powerful aims. The question is: what do they look like in practice, especially for neurodivergent children?

Culture, Not Just Control

Back in 2017, Bennett described behaviour as inseparable from culture – “the way we do things around here.” He stressed the importance of clear routines, high expectations, and visible leadership. These factors still underpin today’s strategy, but what counts as “good behaviour” is often reduced to compliance: sitting still, staying silent, following instructions. Anything else is treated as “bad.” For autistic and other neurodivergent pupils, this framing is where problems begin. Actions like rocking to self-regulate, covering ears, or struggling to switch tasks show need, not defiance – yet they are often disciplined. When behaviour is seen only in terms of control, difference is punished instead of understood.

To move forward, we need more than better systems of control: we need a different way of thinking about what behaviour means. The neurodiversity paradigm offers this shift. Rather than defining autism in terms of deficits measured against a “normal” standard, it starts with autistic experience itself. It sees behaviour from the inside, as meaningful and adaptive, not simply as acceptable or unacceptable.

A new article published this month – What is autism? Identity in jeopardy and the collaborative way ahead (Alexandrovsky, Frayne & Lai, 2025) – develops this perspective. It argues that autism cannot be reduced to a single checklist of impairments, but is better understood as many different “autisms,” shaped by biology, environment, culture, and identity. Crucially, the authors warn that deficit-based definitions have not improved outcomes and often deepen exclusion. By framing autism as a set of impairments, schools and services are pushed towards interventions aimed at correction or compliance, rather than understanding. This not only overlooks autistic strengths but also invalidates lived experience, leaving children feeling marginalised.

Why “What Works” Needs Rethinking

The government’s strategy is built on a simple evidence logic: find schools with higher attendance and fewer exclusions, analyse what they are doing, and spread those practices more widely. In this sense, “what works” is being defined almost entirely by outcomes – calmer classrooms, fuller registers, lower suspension rates.

But outcomes don’t tell the whole story. Attendance statistics, for example, are sometimes presented as though absence itself is the cause of wider problems. Claims that pupils who miss the first week of school are more likely to become persistently absent imply causation, when in reality early absence is usually a symptom of existing barriers (for example, anxiety, overwhelm, or lack of support) rather than the root cause. Treating the absence itself as the problem risks chasing numbers rather than addressing needs.

Exclusion rates are used in a similar way. Government rhetoric often frames high suspension figures as proof of poor behaviour rooted in class or culture, pointing to groups such as white working-class pupils on free school meals. Yet this risks reducing behaviour to an outcome of poverty or parenting, while ignoring the more complex “why” behind it. In 2023–24, one in ten white children on free school meals were suspended, five times the rate of their peers, with only Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children higher. Treating these figures as evidence of cultural or parental failure, however, is a flawed use of statistics: it overlooks the structural barriers and unmet needs that drive behaviour in the first place.

When numbers are treated as causes rather than symptoms, schools are pushed towards quick fixes that improve metrics but do not address underlying realities. Persistent absence and repeated suspensions are not created by a single bad week or by cultural shortcomings; they are signals of deeper disconnection. Without recognising that, behaviour systems risk entrenching inequality and pushing the most vulnerable pupils, including neurodivergent children, even further to the margins.

Masking, Pressure, and Trauma-Informed Alternatives

Rigid systems often mean that natural autistic regulation, such as stimming, is treated as misbehaviour, or that anxiety is labelled as defiance. Faced with this, many children learn to mask, hiding their natural responses to appear “calm” and compliant. From the outside, it looks like evidence that policies are working. But masking carries heavy costs: exhaustion, anxiety, depression, even trauma. Girls are especially likely to mask, which partly explains why their needs are often missed.

Others respond differently: they resist. Naomi Fisher’s Low-Demand Communication Toolkit (2025) shows how some children are hypersensitive to pressure. Even gentle prompts feel threatening, triggering protective “NO” responses. Unlike masking, which is wrongly celebrated, refusal is punished. Yet both are survival strategies, revealing environments that feel unsafe.

Fisher suggests reducing pressure instead: offering choices, creating “escape hatches,” and building trust so children can say yes authentically. Trauma-informed approaches echo this: behaviour is communication, and whole-school cultures of safety, consistency, and supportive relationships are needed. This takes time, staffing, and space. These are costly resources, which is possibly why schools often fall back on control-based quick fixes that look effective on paper but fail to deliver inclusion.

Moving Forward

The behaviour agenda of 2025 builds on Bennett’s review: leadership, consistency, high expectations. These remain important, but must be redefined.

• Leadership cannot mean authority alone; it must model calm, listen, and empower pupils and families.
• Consistency cannot mean rigid uniformity; it must mean reliability, predictability, and fair treatment.
• High expectations cannot be reduced to attendance or silence; they must mean belief in every child’s potential, with the scaffolding to meet ambitious goals.

True high expectations are measured not by how still a classroom is, but by how far pupils progress when they feel safe, supported, and motivated to learn.

If schools can embrace this redefinition, Phillipson’s claim that “we know what works” might finally ring true – not just in calmer classrooms, but in communities where every child, autistic or not, genuinely belongs.

Kate Coldrick – literacy tutor, educator, and resource creator

Read more about practical strategies that support autistic and neurodivergent students in my recent blog post, Inclusive Education for Autistic Students: Evidence Gaps and Urgent Questions, about my work on the About page, or browse my resources for teaching neurodivergent students in Kate Coldrick’s TES shop.

Written by Kate Coldrick, an educator and writer based in Woodbury near Exeter.