No accidents left to excuse

When I first read the Canary Collective’s Systemic Abuse in Education: Breaking the Cycle and Kim Block’s companion essay Is this Systemic Oppression or Systemic Abuse?, I did not feel revelation so much as recognition. I have called what happens to disabled and neurodivergent children in British Columbia’s schools abuse for years, because the word fits the scale and intimacy of the harm. What struck me this time was not the naming of abuse itself, but the deeper clarity that emerged around its origins. The essays did not describe a culture of scattered misjudgements or unfortunate gaps; they exposed a design. They revealed that what so many of us have endured—delay, dismissal, endless escalation—is not the residue of imperfection but the product of intention embedded in policy architecture.

That insight folded seamlessly into the work I have been doing here: the essay The Ombudsperson and the War of Attrition with Systems of Escalation mapped how oversight mechanisms transform injury into process and process into inertia. It described the way families are thanked for their suffering and converted into data for future learning, their living pain translated into administrative evidence. In that piece, I traced how bureaucracy metabolises harm. The Canary Collective’s and Kim Block’s essays provided the corollary: that this metabolism is the system’s design, not its malfunction.

Since starting this website, I have been speaking with other parents, many of whom are considering whether a class action could finally force recognition of this design as discrimination under law. These conversations have confirmed what data already implies: the harm is uniform across districts, consistent across years, and brutally predictable. Every family I know who has a child with a diagnosis has internalised the story that their child is uniquely complex, unusually dysregulated, somehow outside the school’s imagined normal. And every one of us has discovered that our isolation was manufactured, that the system depends on keeping us from seeing the pattern.

This essay begins there—with the realisation that the suffering we once experienced as personal is in fact infrastructural, that the despair we thought was emotional is political, and that what masquerades as error is in truth the logical outcome of an education system designed for scarcity and managed through exhaustion.

The design is visible now. The question is what those who govern will do with that knowledge.

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The cruelty of good intentions

The evidence now stretches beyond anecdote or advocacy—it is structural, historical, and measurable. British Columbia’s government has both the authority and the data to intervene. The task before it is to move from acknowledgment to action. Immediate steps must include transparent publication of exclusion metrics, restoration of oversight independence, and equitable resourcing that matches the scale of identified need. Anything less allows foreseeable harm to persist and deepens legal exposure.

This moment demands political courage equal to the moral clarity that families and educators have already shown. Systems can be redesigned. Policy can be rewritten. The only unacceptable choice is to continue describing cruelty as complexity. Justice begins when the province treats prevention as its first investment and accountability as its highest form of care.

The mirage of benevolence

Every province crafts a public story about its schools. The posters in hallways, the ministry press releases, the conferences on inclusion and belonging all declare the same creed: that every child matters, that every learner can thrive. The slogans are graceful, the videos tender, the intentions apparently radiant. Yet intention is the easiest currency in public administration because it costs nothing. An inclusive education system is not measured by sentiment or marketing; it is measured by infrastructure. It depends on leadership that is visible and accountable, on resourcing that matches obligation, on funding that scales with need, on professional training grounded in evidence and ethics, and on transparency so consistent that the truth requires no excavation. Good intentions without these conditions are a mirage—lovely from afar, dehydrating up close.

The structure of exclusion

The more families I meet, the clearer the pattern becomes. Each story begins in isolation, framed as a singular misfortune: a child deemed “not ready,” a teacher overwhelmed, a specialist absent, an assessment delayed, a parent described as anxious or overinvested. Each explanation implies anomaly. Yet when every family of a disabled or neurodivergent child carries the same exhaustion, when every parent speaks of sleepless nights fearing for their child’s safety or future, the illusion of anomaly collapses. This is no scattering of coincidences; it is a grid of predictability. The harm repeats with such fidelity that it reveals itself as design.

In earlier pieces on this site—fourteen essays tagged designed for despair and eleven tagged designed to exhaust—I have explored this pattern in detail: how repetition masquerades as novelty, how institutions erase memory to avoid accountability, how exhaustion functions as a form of governance. In one such essay, This isn’t a unique case, is it?, I described a moment when my children’s father asked a question so simple and devastating that it pierced the institution’s cultivated amnesia. That question—surely you’ve dealt with this before?—exposed the entire pretense on which school leadership rests. It reminded me that novelty is the institution’s most powerful shield: if harm is always unprecedented, no precedent can guide repair.

How the system narrates harm

The education system tells families that these injuries arise from temperament, readiness, or incompatibility—as if some children arrive pre-disqualified from belonging. The vocabulary of misfit obscures the reality of exclusion by design. The pattern is maintained through a cycle of blame and benevolence: officials express empathy, promise review, and cite complexity, while structural inequities remain intact. Parents who resist are told they misunderstand process, while their children lose months and years to systems built for delay. The performance of care substitutes for the practice of care, and the result is indistinguishable from cruelty.

What an inclusive system requires

A functioning system of inclusion is concrete, not conceptual. It requires:

• Leadership with authority to intervene and the courage to confront harm.
• Resourcing aligned with population need rather than political convenience.
• Funding sufficient to guarantee universal baseline support and responsive flexibility.
• Professional development that cultivates neurodiversity competence and trauma awareness as core literacies, not electives.
• Transparency that turns complaint handling into a public function, where families can track progress and outcomes in real time.

Without these conditions, inclusion remains an ornamental value—displayed, admired, and ultimately hollow.

Shared grief as evidence

I once believed our family’s struggle was an outlier, the product of unlucky circumstance or unusual complexity. I now understand it as a shared geography of grief. Every parent I know who is raising a disabled child in the public system carries the same exhaustion and dread, the same steady erosion of trust, the same widening gap between promise and practice. We whisper the same sentences to each other in parking lots and waiting rooms: I just want my child to feel safe; I just want school to include my child. This chorus is not a collection of anecdotes—it is an epidemiology of despair. And epidemiology is evidence.

From accident to accountability

When harm reaches the threshold of pattern, accident loses moral and legal meaning. Government agencies that continue to describe systemic failure as unfortunate or unintended are engaging in institutional denial. Whenever the education minister speaks, the phrase historic investments appears like a mantra—a rhetorical shield meant to transform funding into moral defence, as if the continual invocation of progress could offset the persistence of harm. The province now possesses ample evidence of foreseeable harm to identifiable groups; continued inaction represents negligence. Immediate corrective measures—funding reform, training investment, independent oversight—are not aspirational improvements; they are obligations arising from knowledge. Future liabilities must be mitigated through direct action now.

The moral pivot

Good intentions cannot rehabilitate structures built on scarcity, opacity, and attrition. An inclusive education system cannot be conjured through empathy campaigns; it must be engineered through law, policy, and sustained investment. The marketing of care without the machinery of care is a form of deception that deepens public distrust and prolongs harm. What children require is not the promise of inclusion but the infrastructure of inclusion.

The collective realisation

When every family describes the same wounds in different words, the truth becomes self-evident: the system functions as designed, and the design is failing children. This recognition transforms private sorrow into collective clarity. It converts fatigue into testimony and testimony into demand. Government leaders now stand at a crossroads between sincerity and substance. The measure of their integrity will be the speed and scale of their response.