Too often, institutions perform accessibility without ever practising it. They adopt the aesthetics of inclusion—the advisory committee, the land acknowledgement, the wheelchair icon —while preserving the very structures that produced the harm in the first place. This is not accessibility. It is reputational maintenance masquerading as equity work. And in public education, it is particularly insidious, because the stakes are not abstract. They are children.
But we’re all doing our best, people say.
Yes—and accessibility is not about intention. It is about the material consequences of choices and omissions. For the person harmed—excluded, restrained, shamed, or disbelieved—the trauma persists regardless of the efforts leading up to that point. The nervous system does not differentiate between negligence and misguided benevolence. What that person needs is not reassurance that everyone meant well. They need to be heard and believed! They need an immediate, intelligible remedy. They need the emotional labour of their disclosure to be met with thanks and action, not deflection.
When disabled students are punished for behaviours that are inextricably linked to their neurotype, and when their parents raise concerns and are met not with reflection but with scripted, defensive bureaucratic rhetoric, the result is not simply institutional failure—it is systemic erasure. A well-written accessibility policy cannot repair a child’s stress response. An advisory committee cannot undo the shame of a seven-year-old excluded for needing support. Only structural change can do that. Only deliberate, reparative action.
I have witnessed, repeatedly, how school systems extend invitations to disabled people—parents, students, advocates—not to shift power, but to orchestrate a performance of inclusion. We are welcomed so long as we bring experience without critique, wounds without fury, insight without analysis. We are asked to humanise a process that has dehumanised us. Don’t swear! We are asked to narrate our pain in ways that are palatable to professionals who remain institutionally insulated from its consequences. They get pay raises, while we grow exhausted.
We are asked to narrate our pain in ways that are palatable to professionals who remain institutionally insulated from its consequences. They get pay raises, while we grow exhausted.
—A Parent
Meanwhile, we are looped into procedural mazes, made to wait through successive rounds of consultation, required to rehearse the harm again and again before we are even permitted to ask for redress. Our presence is welcomed. Our analysis is not.
Aesthetic inclusion is not relational accountability
Symbolic inclusion is worse than no inclusion at all, because it manufactures the illusion of progress while entrenching the status quo. An “access plan” that cannot be located—let alone implemented—is not accessibility. A committee with no authority, no compensation for its members, and no ability to alter policy is not inclusion. It is extraction. It is unpaid labour. A hearing in which facilitators simply recite existing policies, reaffirm the virtue of staff, and redirect discomfort away from systems and toward individuals—this is not accountability. It is theatre.
Real accessibility work begins with the public acknowledgment of harm. Not as a gesture of risk management. Not as an interpersonal apology. But as a moral and procedural imperative. Parents of disabled children—especially those whose children have endured collective punishment, disciplinary exclusion, or coercive compliance—can feel when they are being placated. We recognise the language of containment when we hear it. We know when a district is protecting its public image rather than its students.
One of the most intractable barriers to genuine progress is institutional ego. Leaders become deeply entangled in the narratives they have constructed about themselves—as progressive, as inclusive, as already committed to the work. But accessibility is not about preserving reputations. It is about revising systems. It is about hearing hard truths and choosing to be changed by them.
To acknowledge that harm has occurred is not to negate prior accomplishments. It is to understand that legitimacy cannot be retroactively applied to harmful actions. Progress demands something more elemental than good intentions. It demands humility.
Leaders must be willing to relinquish the fantasy of control—to throw their ego into the ocean, as I’ve written elsewhere—to let it churn until it is no longer sharp, until it no longer cuts. This is not metaphor for metaphor’s sake. It is a precise description of what transformation requires: the surrender of performative virtue in exchange for relational repair.
“Change is like beach glass—sharp and rough at first, but over time, with the relentless churning of waves and sand, it becomes smooth and transformed. That’s how I see accessibility work: a sea change. It can be uncomfortable, even overwhelming, but it’s also necessary.”
—A Parent
If you claim to be listening to parents but cannot name what was done to their children, you are not listening. If you frame yourself as an ally to disability rights while continuing to enforce regressive, exclusionary discipline, you are not aligned. You are speaking the language of equity to preserve existing hierarchies. That is not access work. That is erasure with a progressive veneer.
When I critique your process, it is not to diminish you. It is to name what your current practices refuse to confront. Growth does not occur by defending against discomfort. It occurs when we metabolise it—when we let it change what we do.
The cost of participation
I have served on school district committees in which half the members are institutional actors and the other half are parents still carrying the aftermath of systemic harm. We are asked to share. To be vulnerable. To help “improve” things. But the process is framed through institutional logic. There is no trauma-informed orientation. No acknowledgment of asymmetrical stakes. No safeguards for disclosure. No clarity about what, if anything, will change.
Just an inbox full of meeting invites. Just a screen where I introduced myself, trembling. With people in the room that have gouged my heart out before through their dismissal of my child’s needs. Knowing my honesty might be punished. Knowing I was only there because I had no other option—because my child was still suffering, and I was still trying to be heard, trying to make change, so others would not have to endure this endless pain and exhaustion.
Toward meaningful response
If schools wish to move beyond performative accessibility, they must transform how they respond to harm. Especially when that harm stems from disciplinary frameworks that pathologise difference and reward compliance over authenticity.
This means:
- acknowledging, in specific terms, the actions that caused harm;
- communicating clearly and accessibly with affected families—not in vague language, but with precision and respect;
- involving those families in the design of reparative solutions—not merely offering them apologies or, worse, defensive justifications;
- documenting and responding to feedback in ways that are transparent, traceable, and acted upon;
- and creating sustained mechanisms for reflection, repair, and co-governance—not one-off consultations performed for optics.
It also means being willing to sit with the discomfort that your system may have violated children’s rights. That your policies may have perpetuated exclusion. That you have more to learn—and that this learning must lead to material change.
Growth
When a disabled student is punished for being disabled, that is harm. When their parent is gaslit while advocating, that is institutional harm. But when a district listens without defensiveness, acknowledges without equivocation, and changes without delay—that is the beginning of repair. That is the line between performance and transformation.
We do not need more policy statements, more protracted processes saturated with buzzwords, more symbolic gestures masquerading as progress. What we need—urgently, unequivocally—is the courage to say: this happened; it was wrong; here is how we will prevent it from happening again.
Until that courage materialises into action, your access plan remains a brochure, your committee a proscenium, and your promise of inclusion just another line in a PR campaign that disabled families cannot afford to believe.
