The BC Ministry of Education’s guide presents itself as a blueprint for positive school climates. Yet beneath its conciliatory language, it reinforces behavioural conformity and institutional authority over student autonomy. It fails to address the structural and sensory barriers faced by neurodivergent students, and in doing so, undermines its own claims to safety and care.
The problem of behavioural normativity
The guide repeatedly invokes “expected behaviour” without defining whose expectations are being privileged. This universalising language erases neurodivergent ways of being, moving, and communicating. By positioning neurotypical behaviours as inherently “appropriate,” the guide marginalises students whose nervous systems respond differently to stress, transitions, or sensory input. A neurodiversity-affirming approach would challenge the premise that order requires sameness.
Token inclusion, structural exclusion
Though the guide gestures toward diversity and respect, it avoids naming disability, neurodivergence, or trauma as core considerations. Inclusion is not accomplished through rhetoric alone. True inclusion requires the redesign of institutional norms, environments, and responses to dysregulation. This document retains the structural grammar of exclusion while cloaking it in the vocabulary of civility.
Safety framed through control, not consent
The guide treats adult control as the foundation of safety, ignoring the reality that many students—especially those with trauma histories or sensory processing differences—experience harm in highly controlled environments. It fails to define safety in terms of emotional security, relational trust, or cultural responsiveness. Safety, in a neurodiversity-affirming context, must be co-constructed and consent-based, not imposed.
Discipline without due process
The guide outlines disciplinary measures such as suspension and removal without addressing their disproportionate impact on disabled, racialised, and neurodivergent students. It does not mention procedural safeguards, trauma-informed alternatives, or the rights of children to meaningful participation in decisions affecting them. Discipline is framed as morally neutral and institutionally necessary—an assertion that obfuscates its carceral logic.
Compliance masquerading as care
The guide conflates regulation with morality and obedience with wellness. Students are expected to internalise adult expectations as evidence of growth, while non-compliance is framed as a failure of character rather than a possible expression of unmet needs. Co-regulation, sensory accommodations, and autonomy-supportive practices are absent. Care, in this framework, is synonymous with control.
Recommendations
To align with a disability justice framework, the Ministry must reimagine what it means to create a safe, caring, and orderly school. This involves:
- Abandoning behavioural compliance models in favour of relationship-based, neurodiversity-affirming approaches.
- Embedding the expertise of disabled students and families in the development of school policy.
- Recognising distress behaviours as communication, not as defiance.
- Explicitly banning collective punishment and punitive exclusion.
- Centreing autonomy, consent, and emotional safety as non-negotiable rights in every learning environment.
A truly inclusive school does not erase difference. It cultivates environments where every student—especially those who diverge from the norm—feels seen, safe, and supported.
