On the first day of school, it all looked so promising that it seemed almost too good to be true—the hallway bulletin boards overflowed with vibrant slogans about kindness, leadership, and community belonging, while the principal’s welcome message spoke in glowing terms about student voice, shared responsibility, and the promise of a positive school culture that would value every child’s contribution.
My children came home with wide eyes and hopeful voices, describing the daily announcers and peer leaders—students selected to model the school’s ideals, to guide others in embodying its values, and to act as living proof that these principles could be worn like uniforms, visible and rewarded.
But over time, the shine wore off, and what had appeared to be a celebration of student agency gradually revealed itself as something far more rigid and conditional—a carefully staged system of behavioural pageantry.
What looked like empowerment was something else entirely: a performance of correctness, a narrow kind of visibility granted only to those whose natural rhythms happened to align with adult expectations and institutional scripts.
Leadership was not about noticing injustice or caring publicly or setting new directions for inclusion—it was about staying still, speaking politely, and performing regulated calm under fluorescent light.
Again and again, the same children were elevated and congratulated, not for acts of imagination or courage, but for consistency, composure, and compliance.
My neurodivergent children struggled, not because they lacked compassion, insight, or a sense of justice, but because their bodies revealed their overwhelm and their needs made them visible in inconvenient ways.
The problem of performative leadership
When students are praised for announcing a set of adult-authored values—words like purpose, respect, and integrity—what is being rewarded is not internalised ethics or relational courage, but alignment with institutional tone and behavioural fluency that most often reflects neurotypical regulation patterns.
The values were abstract, delivered as if universal, but devoid of context and dissociated from the lived complexity of the students asked to model them.
Students were not celebrated for initiating new ways of belonging or calling attention to unmet needs, but rather for embodying the calm, quiet reliability that makes classroom management easier and adult perception more comfortable.
My children were never seen as leaders—not because they lacked wisdom or empathy, but because they could not suppress the bodily truth of their nervous systems or contain the sharp edges of their experience long enough to pass as unremarkable.
Behavioural incentives as soft surveillance
The values-based incentive system operated with a logic that was soft on its surface but deeply coercive in its structure, rewarding behaviours that upheld institutional comfort and overlooking the adaptations, resilience, and insight often expressed by students through so-called “unexpected” behaviour.
This is a pattern I have seen across many schools: children who can sustain eye contact, use affirming language, follow multi-step directions, and sit patiently for long stretches are elevated, while children whose regulation requires movement, silence, repetition, or space are gently—but persistently—excluded from visibility and leadership.
Students who experience anxiety, trauma responses, executive dysfunction, demand avoidance, or communication delay are framed not as potential contributors to a broader understanding of what leadership can be, but as burdens to be managed with scripted kindness.
Nowhere in the system was there a role for the student who walks away in order to stay safe, or who uses a script to ask for help, or who melts down when the classroom environment overwhelms them—these children were offered support, perhaps, but never honour.
Euphemism and institutional tone
The official communication around this program used polished optimism so thick it left no oxygen for contradiction, no space for distress, and no acknowledgment that real inclusion is always unfinished, uncomfortable, and shaped by tension.
There was no mention of struggle, no admission that students might experience harm in the very spaces where kindness was being performed, no sense that values must be contested and refined if they are to be lived by real children in real bodies.
This tone teaches children that politeness is safer than honesty, that success means being easy to teach, and that the only stories worth telling are those that end in calm resolution.
It teaches adults that all is well unless someone cries too loud, and that the students who cannot hold their bodies still or their feelings quiet must be helped—gently, invisibly, and as far from the morning announcements as possible.
A different vision of inclusion and leadership
True leadership does not look like memorising the rules and smiling through distress; it looks like noticing when someone is struggling and responding with care, like knowing your own limits and choosing rest, like helping others find voice when systems render them inaudible.
It means that a child who uses an AAC device to explain what co-regulation feels like is given the same stage as a student who earns academic awards, that a non-speaking student’s comic strip about shutdowns is displayed with the same reverence as a sports trophy.
Leadership means recognising that asking for help can be an act of community care, that setting a boundary is an act of relational intelligence, and that being the first to leave when a space is unsafe is not avoidance but wisdom.
Instead of scripting abstract values, we could invite children to describe the real ways they support one another: “Today I made a quiet space for someone who needed less noise,” or “I noticed my friend was anxious so I helped explain the assignment,” or “I didn’t force my partner to speak when they were overwhelmed, I gave them time.”
Inclusion is not folding the margins into the centre
To create a school culture worthy of all children, the rules cannot be delivered from above; they must be shaped in relationship, with the full awareness that those most often excluded carry knowledge that is vital for everyone’s safety and belonging.
The classroom must become a place where stimming, pacing, scripting, silence, shutdown, and resistance are seen not as disruptions to be disciplined, but as expressions to be understood, respected, and supported.
This does not mean chaos. It means polyphony. It means a learning environment that holds the truth of difference without attempting to flatten it into sameness.
Inclusion cannot mean teaching children to better fit the system so that they may survive it. It must mean changing the system so that all children can belong—fully, loudly, imperfectly, and without fear of being cast out for having a body or a brain that moves differently through the world.
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Why I’m reviewing school codes of conduct
To the student who found this page because you typed something scared or confused or angry into a search bar—something like “are teachers allowed to take away recess?” or “can I be suspended for a meltdown?” or “why did my teacher say I…
