Are “calm” classrooms really inclusive? Why behaviour routines can push neurodivergent students into masking and how schools can design for true belonging.

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In 2025, the government’s behaviour and attendance agenda promises calm, safe, and dignified schools. Behaviour is presented not only as discipline but as the culture through which students will experience dignity and belonging.

The ambition is right. Belonging should be at the heart of school life. But the problem lies in how belonging is being measured. If calm classrooms and outward compliance are taken as evidence of inclusion, we risk rewarding masking (when students hide their natural responses to avoid negative attention) and confusing this with true belonging. In practice, masking often requires suppression: pushing down stims, questions, or signs of distress in order to appear “calm.” What staff may read as focus or dignity is sometimes only silence, maintained at great emotional cost.

The assumptions behind behaviour

Much of the government’s approach to behaviour has been shaped by Tom Bennett, former lead advisor on behaviour to the Department for Education and newly-appointed DfE Attendance and Behaviour Ambassador. His guidance frames misbehaviour as students “testing boundaries,” “competing for peer approval,” or resisting authority for entertainment (Bennett, 2015, 2016). Routines, norms, and sanctions are presented as a curriculum: something all students must be taught, with consequences applied whenever rules are resisted. Sanctions, he stresses, must be certain and immediate.

This framing makes one assumption very clear: that disruption is usually intentional. Students are understood as choosing to misbehave, and the role of staff is to ensure that those choices are met with consequences.

Sometimes, this is accurate. Some children do push boundaries to test limits. But as a blanket assumption, it is deeply flawed. For many autistic and ADHD students, what looks like defiance is not about choice at all. Delayed compliance may reflect monotropic attention – the difficulty of shifting focus immediately from one task to another. Stimming may be a way to regulate anxiety, not to undermine authority. Verbal outbursts may come from sensory overload, not a desire to entertain peers (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025).

When policies are built on the assumption of wilfulness, neurological differences are recast as deliberate disruption. Distress is reframed as defiance. And suppression (or hiding one’s natural responses to avoid punishment) becomes the only way to survive.

SLANT: posture as performance

Many schools now codify “good behaviour” into routines like SLANT: Sit up. Lean forward. Ask and answer questions. Nod your head. Track the speaker. On the surface, SLANT is about attentiveness. But its deeper message is that belonging is proven through posture.

For some students, these expectations directly conflict with how they process information. One autistic participant explained, “I can’t concentrate while making eye contact, particularly if I need to listen to what the other person is saying to me. It’s like I need to shut off the visual input in order to completely process the aural input” (Trevisan et al., 2017). Another described the bind: “If I don’t make eye contact…I’m able to concentrate on the conversation but people think I’m not paying attention. If I do make eye contact, I’m unable to concentrate on the conversation but people think I’m more attentive” (Trevisan et al., 2017). Here, eye contact is misread as focus when in fact it obstructs understanding.

Other natural behaviours are equally misinterpreted. Stimming (for example, rocking, tapping, using fidget toys, or repeating words) supports regulation and concentration. Yet students report being corrected or sanctioned: “I just needed to find out why she [the teacher] called me rude, because I hadn’t been rude and why it [the fidget toy] needed to be taken off me because I wasn’t distracting anyone” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025). Within the SLANT framework, regulation becomes disruption, and coping becomes misconduct.

The result is that calm posture becomes camouflage. Students must suppress the very strategies that help them learn. And here the assumption of intent does its work: a failure to SLANT is read as wilful refusal, rather than difficulty. Teachers are guided to escalate sanctions, not to question whether the expectation itself is the source of stress (Bennett, 2015).

Signal for Silence: when quiet isn’t safe

Noise is one of the hardest parts of school life for many autistic students. One explained that when his class was noisy, “It causes pain. It really hurts my ears and then I just shout and get angry. I really don’t like it” (Birkett et al., 2022). Yet he contrasted this with the playground, where the noise was louder but less overwhelming because it was outside and “diluted.” Inside, sound was “trapped” and inescapable. Quiet, then, can be welcome – but only when it genuinely reduces sensory overload.

The Signal for Silence routine takes that idea of quiet and reframes it as a rule. At the signal of a raised hand, students are expected to stop talking, raise their own hand, and “track” the teacher. This is less about creating a calm environment and more about demanding visible compliance. What looks like order is in fact a tightly policed performance, with sanctions if the cues are missed.

For many autistic students, this combination of silence and gaze undermines focus rather than securing it. Participants in Trevisan et al. (2017) described eye contact as “sort of like getting shocked,” leading quickly to panic and exhaustion. Far from being a marker of attentiveness, enforced “tracking” drains energy and makes it harder to learn.

The silence achieved in these contexts also comes at a price. Students often maintain it not because they feel calm, but because they are masking. As one put it, “If I express stress … people around me might get stressed … So I think it’s just better if I don’t tell people” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025). Another reflected, “I do think I definitely mask a lot at school. I mask a lot of my feelings, of how I feel” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025). Suppressing feelings also means suppressing coping strategies such as humming, whispering, or repeating words. What appears to be calm is really the concealment of distress.

The outcome is not genuine calm but vigilance: students monitoring themselves, suppressing needs, and fearing mistakes. Silence may be read by staff as focus, but for many students it is only camouflage.

Tight transitions: when immediacy punishes difference

“Tight transitions” require students to stop instantly, tuck in chairs, and line up at a signal. The principle is efficiency: no wasted time, no hesitation. But for many autistic students, transitions are not neutral. They collide with the way attention and processing work.

Autistic adults often describe being pulled away from focus as startling or even painful. One said it felt like being “startled,” another as “such a shock,” while others spoke of the mental exhaustion of having to “transition away” from a deep focus: “so mentally draining for me,” “leaving me confused,” or making it “very hard to get motivated again” – especially when the task had not been completed (Rapaport et al., 2024). Students echo the same experience. As one explained, “If someone interrupts me, then it makes me frustrated … Because when my focus is broken from something that I like, it sort of breaks the immersion” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025).

These are not descriptions of defiance. They are descriptions of how monotropic attention works: attention is absorbed deeply in one task, and pulling it away feels like a rupture. Executive functioning differences compound the difficulty, making it harder to disengage quickly and reorient to something new.

Yet behaviour frameworks allow no such flexibility. Sanctions are designed to be “immediate” and “certain” (Bennett, 2016). In practice, this means that a student who takes longer to process or complete a task is treated as if they are refusing outright. A pause to process is indistinguishable from defiance, and the line between the two is erased.

Super Walking: silence in the corridor

The same assumptions underpin expectations outside the classroom. Corridor conduct is often managed through routines such as Super Walking: students line up silently, facing forwards, hands by their sides, one behind the other. The goal is order. But for neurodivergent students, corridors are already overwhelming environments.

One autistic student explained, “I get stressed over things being squished into one small area, and claustrophobic actually. I fear small spaces because it makes me, it just makes it hard to breathe” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025). Another described how “the hallways are the busiest, when everyone moves from one class to another. It feels a bit closed in because there’s a lot of people in one area and all over the stairs. […] My own space is being invaded and I have like, this much left” (Birkett et al., 2022). For these students, corridor noise and proximity are already a source of distress, before any behavioural rules are applied.

Yet the routine removes coping strategies. A brief chat with a friend might reduce anxiety, but silence is enforced. Asking for reassurance risks correction. Coordination difficulties compound the problem: “I feel quite embarrassed I just walked into someone or just about to” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025). What could be treated with support becomes a public error.

Here too, the assumption of intent does its work. A stumble, a mutter, or a whispered reassurance is interpreted as refusal to comply, rather than as evidence of sensory overload. The sanction that follows may appear fair and consistent, but it misreads distress as defiance.

Sanctions and the fear of mistakes

Sanctions are presented as the backbone of behaviour systems. As Bennett argues, severity matters less than certainty: every infraction must be met with a consequence (Bennett, 2015). The intention is fairness: every student treated the same, every rule consistently enforced. But for neurodivergent students, this “certainty” translates into constant tension.

Several described the anxiety this creates. “I’m just scared that I’m going to say the wrong thing” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025). Another explained, “Just thinking about what could happen if I don’t understand or do stuff properly, the repercussions that will have in the future, which then stresses me out a bit more” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025). For others, the impact was a corrosive sense of self-blame: “I feel like I’ve disappointed myself, I’ll feel like I’ve done bad for myself, like I’ve caused a problem or I’ve disappointed other people than myself” (Pavlopoulou et al., 2025).

Misunderstandings are especially common. One student reflected, “I often did things which the teachers would think was bad behaviour, but it was just me misunderstanding what we were meant to be doing … [I was] always being told off for things which I didn’t understand were wrong” (Billington et al., 2024). What is framed as wilful non-compliance may in reality be confusion, sensory overload, or a different way of processing instructions.

For students who already fear being misunderstood, sanctions amplify rather than resolve anxiety. When every delay, stim, or misjudged word might trigger a consequence, masking becomes the default survival strategy. Sanctions may produce short-term order, but the culture they create is brittle. Belonging becomes conditional: students are accepted only if they can hide difference successfully.

Token exceptions and the training gap

Some policies acknowledge that not all students will fit the mould. One behaviour curriculum, for example, notes that “certain children with ASD” may be exceptions to rules such as eye contact or tracking (Anonymous Primary School, n.d.). But this is presented as a single line – a gesture towards equity rather than a framework for genuine inclusion. There is no guidance on how staff should recognise these students (particularly given the long waits for formal diagnosis), nor how they should adapt routines meaningfully in practice.

The problem is not simply omission. It is structural. Teachers are trained within a framework that emphasises wilful refusal: that if a student does not comply, they are choosing not to, and sanctions must follow (Bennett, 2016). Without an alternative lens, difference is read as defiance.

To make these exceptions meaningful, staff need more than a line in a policy. They need training that helps them:

• Recognise neurodivergent differences, even when undiagnosed, including monotropism, sensory processing differences, and executive functioning challenges.

• Distinguish delay from defiance. Students who need longer to transition or who stim during instruction are not resisting authority; they are processing or regulating.

• Adapt expectations. Routines can provide structure without being rigid: offering options (for example, looking at a desk instead of making eye contact), allowing verbal stimming, or giving extra processing time.

• Respond with support, not sanction. Staff need permission and confidence to flex routines when compliance itself causes harm.

Without this, exceptions remain tick-boxes, written to satisfy legal obligations under the Equality Act, but without substance. Staff continue to default to sanctions, and students continue to camouflage to survive.

Real-world evidence of belonging

These arguments are not hypothetical. Families are already reporting the difference that a culture of belonging can make.

Writing in The Irish Times, Lucinda Murrihy (2025) described how her eight-year-old autistic daughter went from begging to stay home to returning from school calm and positive. The change did not come from stricter routines or firmer sanctions, but from moving to a Gaelscoil where belonging was explicitly nurtured.

At this school, Murrihy explained, belonging was practised “not through slogans on walls but in every interaction.” Distressing behaviours were understood as communication, not disobedience. Staff responded with curiosity, flexibility, and teamwork, sometimes bringing in outside expertise and always aiming to understand rather than exclude.

The impact was immediate. Her daughter’s support needs reduced dramatically, and school shifted from a place of fear to one of safety, joy, and growth. As Murrihy concluded, “Inclusion should not be a lottery. It should be the very least every child can expect at school.”

This example illustrates the core argument: calm and dignity are not produced by rigid behavioural compliance, but by cultures of belonging that reduce emotional burden and allow students to thrive.

From emotional burden to long-term harm

The My Emotions in School Inventory (MESI) demonstrates the toll this takes. Neurodivergent students report almost twice the emotional load of their peers (Lukito et al., 2025). What policies interpret as calm is, for many, the weight of unacknowledged burden.

And the consequences extend far beyond school. Evidence from the National Child Development Study shows that childhood adversity (such as neglect, abuse, chronic stress) predicts poor mental health and chronic pain in adulthood (Timmins et al., 2025). This research is not specific to neurodivergence, but its lesson is stark: adversity in childhood does not disappear when the school day ends. If schools mistake masking for belonging, they risk becoming a site of adversity themselves.

Towards genuine belonging

If calm and compliance are mistaken for belonging, behaviour policies will continue to reward suppression and misinterpret distress. But genuine belonging requires a different approach.

• Belonging as the measure: Success should not be judged by silence, posture, or immediate compliance. The real question is whether students feel safe, recognised, and valued for who they are.

• Behaviour as communication: Outbursts, delays, or stimming are not defiance but information about unmet needs or sensory stressors. These signals should prompt support, not punishment.

• Reducing emotional burden through design, not suppression: Schools can lessen sensory overload by thinking about how spaces are used (for example, staggering transitions, offering quieter routes, or providing safe breakout areas) rather than demanding students walk in rigid silence. Predictable routines can provide clarity without being enforced as a straitjacket. Transitions need flexibility so students have time to disengage from one task and reorient to the next.

• Freedom to regulate: Students should be allowed to use self-regulation strategies such as rocking, tapping, humming, repeating words, without fear of correction. These are not distractions but essential ways of managing attention and anxiety.

• Exceptions with substance, not tick-boxes: Policies should go beyond a one-line nod to “certain children with ASD.” Teachers need training and clear guidance on how to recognise when routines create barriers, including for students without a formal diagnosis, and how to adapt meaningfully.

In my tutoring practice, I see how predictability and trust can lower anxiety without requiring students to mask. Allowing a student to finish their train of thought before moving on, or to ask for clarification without fear, creates genuine calm. The result is not fragile compliance but confidence and a sense that they belong in the learning space.

Conclusion

Calm classrooms cannot be built on hidden distress. Masking may be rewarded as “good behaviour,” but it carries a cost: sadness, alienation, and long-term risk to mental health.

True calm comes from belonging – from students feeling safe enough to be themselves, to ask questions without fear, to use stimming or other strategies to manage their emotions. By contrast, calm built on suppression is fragile: it depends on students concealing distress, and it leaves them carrying a burden that will eventually erupt or linger as lasting harm.

If behaviour policies are truly to deliver dignity and belonging, they must move beyond surface compliance. The question cannot be “are our corridors silent?” but “do our students feel seen, supported, and safe?” Only when the answer is yes will calm reflect culture rather than camouflage.

Further Reading & Sources

• Anonymous Primary School. (n.d.). Behaviour curriculum [Internal school policy document].

• Bennett, T. (2015). Managing difficult behaviour in schools: A practical guide. UNISON. Link

• Bennett, T. (2016). The beginning teacher’s behaviour toolkit: A summary. Department for Education. Link

• Billington, J., Loucas, T., & Knott, F. (2024). “I liked school, but school didn’t like me”: Autistic young adults’ reflections on their mainstream primary school experiences. Billington Neurodiversity. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330241310174

• Birkett, L., McGrath, L., & Tucker, I. (2022). Muting, filtering and transforming space: Autistic children’s sensory ‘tactics’ for navigating mainstream school space following transition to secondary school. Emotion, Space and Society, 42, Article 100872. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2022.100872

• Murrihy, L. (2025, August 29). Inclusion at school [Letter to the editor]. The Irish Times. Link

• Pavlopoulou, G., Chandler, S., Lukito, S., Kakoulidou, M., Jackson, I., Ly, E., Matejko, M., Balwani, B., Boyens, T., Poulton, D., Harvey-Nguyen, L., Baker, S., Sonuga-Barke, E. J. S., Danese, A., Downs, J., Funnell, E., Griffiths, K., … Wilson, A. (2025). Upsetting experiences in the lives of neurodivergent young people: An exploratory qualitative study. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcv2.70038

• Lukito, S., Chandler, S., Kakoulidou, M., Griffiths, K., Wyatt, A., Funnell, E., Pavlopoulou, G., Baker, S., Stahl, D., Sonuga-Barke, E., & the RE-STAR team. (2025). Emotional burden in school as a source of mental health problems associated with ADHD and autism: Development and validation of the My Emotions in School Inventory (MESI). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.70003

• Rapaport, H., Clapham, H., Adams, J., Lawson, W., Porayska-Pomsta, K., & Pellicano, E. (2024). “In a state of flow”: A qualitative examination of autistic adults’ phenomenological experiences of task immersion. Autism in Adulthood, 6(3), 362–373. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2023.0032

• Timmins, K. A., MacDonald, R., Beasley, M., & Macfarlane, G. J. (2025). Adverse childhood experiences and health at age 50 years in the National Child Development Study. JAMA Network Open, 8(8), e2525708. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2025-123456

• Trevisan, D. A., Roberts, N., Lin, C., & Birmingham, E. (2017). How do adults and teens with self-declared Autism Spectrum Disorder experience eye contact? A qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts. PLoS One, 12(11), e0188446. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188446

Written by Kate Coldrick, literacy tutor and educational writer. Explore more of my articles and resources for teaching neurodivergent students at katecoldrick.com

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