POPARD’s internal PDA training materials have been circulating through parent communities this week, released through a freedom of information request to a BC school district, and what they reveal is something more structurally damning than a policy directive to dismiss Pathological Demand Avoidance — they expose the precise mechanism by which an organisation can train its people on PDA while preserving every operational pathway that allows them to override PDA-informed practice when it matters most.
The consultant-only FAQ
The two-page handout is the document POPARD gives its consultants before they walk into your child’s school, and its most consequential passage appears early: PDA is described as “not currently a ‘diagnosable’ condition,” clinicians who identify it are characterised as offering “general observations and clinical impressions,” and POPARD states that it “does not have a position on PDA.”
This language does quiet, devastating work. It does not say “PDA is not yet included in the DSM” — a factual statement that would leave room for the clinical reality of the profile. It says PDA is not diagnosable, with scare quotes around the word, which retroactively delegitimises every psychoeducational assessment that has already identified it. For a parent who has paid thousands of dollars for a private assessment, who has sat through hours of clinical interviews and standardised testing, who has received a report explicitly identifying their child’s PDA profile and recommending PDA-informed strategies — this passage tells them that the provincial body responsible for translating that diagnosis into school-based support considers the entire foundation of their child’s accommodation plan to be provisional, speculative, and insufficiently researched.
The handout also states that POPARD “does not have a position on PDA because there is no consensus among researchers and clinicians on the definition or diagnosis of PDA.” Yet the same handout proceeds to describe the PDA profile in substantial detail — the anxiety-driven need for control, the social capability that can mask underlying processing difficulties, the strategic nature of avoidance behaviour — and explicitly instructs consultants that these children are “socially strategic — not socially manipulative.” POPARD claims to have no position while simultaneously articulating one, and the institutional ambiguity gives individual consultants permission to land wherever their own training inclines them.
Districts do not have the right to override what an external psychologist has documented about a specific child, particularly when the recommended strategies demonstrably work. The duty to accommodate under the Charter, the BC Human Rights Code, and the School Act is owed to the child, and the operative question is what works for this specific child — not whether the child’s profile appears in a diagnostic manual that POPARD’s consultants consider authoritative. A psychologist’s report identifying a PDA profile and recommending specific strategies constitutes expert clinical evidence. When a district possesses that evidence, and when the family has demonstrated that the recommended strategies produce measurable improvements in the child’s functioning, the district’s obligation is to implement those strategies. “POPARD told us PDA is not a real diagnosis” is not a bona fide reason for refusal. It is a substitution of one organisation’s institutional posture for the clinical judgment of the professional who actually assessed the child.
The strategies table
The strategies document — the one watermarked “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE” — is structured as a three-column table translating between “universal language,” “corresponding behavioural terms,” and “explanation/examples/sample strategies.” It is, in essence, a Rosetta Stone, rendering Applied Behaviour Analysis legible to educators who might resist its explicit vocabulary while preserving its operational logic beneath the surface.
“Build trusting relationships” becomes “pairing.” “Leverage off special interests” becomes “identify powerful reinforcers and figure out how to use them effectively.” “Teach, don’t demand” becomes “use a variety of natural, softer SDs, identify student skill levels and start teaching at their ‘high probability’ level for success.” “Communicate with diplomacy and logic” becomes “use validation and empathy as a form of social attention, do not adhere to rigid expectations (choose battles), and seek social validity for your strategies.” “Use rewards and praise with caution” becomes “identify what kind of social attention actually acts as a reinforcer versus a punisher/produces counter-control effects.”
A consultant trained in ABA reads the behavioural column as the real framework and the universal column as the communication strategy designed to reduce friction with parents and teachers who might resist explicit behavioural language. The softening is strategic, designed to make the approach palatable rather than to transform it.
And yet — the strategies themselves are not uniformly terrible. The document advises seeking cooperation rather than compliance, warns that explicit positive feedback can remind PDA-profile children they have surrendered control and produce the opposite of the intended effect, recommends approaching with low demand and low conflict, instructs consultants to involve children in decision-making, and cautions against praising children merely for attending school. These are substantively reasonable recommendations that align with what the PDA Society, Fidler and Christie, and most PDA-informed clinicians would advocate. The strategies document demonstrates that POPARD possesses the knowledge to support PDA-profile children appropriately.
Which makes the question inescapable: if POPARD possesses this knowledge internally, why are families still receiving reinforcer menus and token economy handouts? The answer lies in the institutional architecture. The strategies document exists alongside the consultant-only FAQ that tells consultants PDA is not diagnosable, alongside the NCAEP’s list of 28 behavioural interventions, alongside the reward menus and compliance frameworks, and nothing in the institutional architecture tells the consultant which framework governs. The good strategies are presented as one option within a toolkit rather than as the governing framework for PDA-profile children. The consultant in the room decides, and the organisation’s hedging gives her permission to choose the chart.
The two slides
Two slides from POPARD’s PDA workshop crystallise the contradiction with visual precision that no amount of internal hedging can obscure.
The first — titled “Clarity with Respect to Assessment and Potential Identification of PDA” — presents four questions under the heading “Questions still under consideration”: should PDA exist as a diagnosis, how does it overlap with other conditions, what should it be called, and can clear diagnostic criteria be agreed upon. POPARD hosted its first PDA conference in November 2022. It is advertising another PDA workshop for April 2026. Four years later, the same questions remain under consideration, the same framing positions PDA as speculative, and the same institutional posture allows consultants to treat PDA-informed practice as optional while children grow up inside the gap between what POPARD knows and what it is willing to commit to.
The second slide is the operational one — the one that tells consultants what to actually do — and it is the most alarming document in the entire release. It quotes the PDA Society’s 2021 position statement directly: conventional support strategies, including those often recommended for autism, are often ineffective and counterproductive with a PDA profile, and in their place belongs a person-centred approach grounded in negotiation, collaboration, and flexibility. Then, immediately below, the slide displays the National Clearinghouse on Autism Evidence and Practice’s 28 evidence-based practices — a list that includes discrete trial training, extinction, differential reinforcement, behavioural momentum intervention, reinforcement, prompting, and response interruption/redirection. The PDA Society’s warning and the NCAEP’s behavioural toolkit appear on the same slide, unresolved, without hierarchy, without guidance on which one governs when a parent says, “This will harm my child.”
This adjacency is the architecture of institutional ambivalence, and it operates with devastating efficiency. When the consultant in the room is a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst whose professional identity, certification requirements, and training all anchor in learning theory, the choice is predetermined. She will reach for the reinforcer menu, because that is what her discipline requires, and POPARD’s training materials have given her permission to do so by framing the PDA-informed alternative as one option among many rather than as the governing framework for PDA-profile children.
What these records illuminate about families’ experiences
Many families who have been through a POPARD consultation will recognise the pattern these documents expose. A parent arrives with a psychologist’s report identifying a PDA profile and recommending specific, relationship-based strategies. The consultant acknowledges the report, perhaps even recommends a PDA-informed text like Fidler and Christie’s Collaborative Approaches to Learning for Pupils with PDA. And then, in the same resource package, the consultant sends reward menus, token economy handouts, reinforcer checklists, and behavioural data collection tools — the precise instruments the PDA literature warns against, bundled alongside the book that explains why they cause harm.
The parent objects. The parent explains, in writing, why these approaches are contraindicated — citing the psychologist’s report, the child’s documented responses to demand, the observable distress that reward-based systems produce. The parent may even offer alternatives grounded in current neurodevelopmental research: relational strategies, inquiry-based approaches, collaborative problem-solving frameworks, environmental adaptations that reduce demand rather than incentivising compliance with it.
The consultant responds with professional courtesy and procedural language. Rapport building is acknowledged as important. The parent’s concerns are noted. The consultation continues along its predetermined course, framed around “dysregulated behaviours” — a framing that positions the child’s distress as the target behaviour to be managed rather than as a signal of environmental mismatch requiring systemic adaptation. The behavioural toolkit remains intact. The parent is left to choose between accepting interventions they know will cause harm or withdrawing from the consultation entirely — and if they withdraw, the school retains the POPARD materials as institutional validation for the compliance-based approach the parent was trying to prevent.
This is the pattern these documents explain. The consultant-only FAQ gives consultants permission to dismiss the psychologist’s report by questioning the legitimacy of PDA itself. The strategies table provides PDA-informed guidance that consultants can choose to ignore because it is presented as optional rather than governing. The workshop slides place the PDA Society’s warnings alongside the NCAEP’s behavioural toolkit without resolving the contradiction, leaving the consultant to decide which framework applies — a decision that invariably favours the framework aligned with the consultant’s own training, certification, and professional identity.
The harm is predictable, documented, and structurally enabled.
What a better path would require
These documents did not reveal a policy directive to dismiss PDA. They revealed something more structurally entrenched: an organisation that teaches its consultants about PDA while preserving every operational mechanism that allows them to override PDA-informed practice when it conflicts with their behavioural training. The hedging is the policy. The unresolved tension is the design. The adjacency of contradictory frameworks without hierarchical resolution is the permission structure that enables consultants to send families a PDA textbook and a reward menu in the same email and call both of them support.
A genuinely reformed POPARD — or its replacement — would need to do what these materials carefully avoid: state plainly that PDA-informed practice governs when a child presents with a PDA profile, that conventional behavioural strategies including token economies, reinforcement schedules, extinction procedures, and compliance-based frameworks are contraindicated for these children, and that parental expertise grounded in sustained observation of a specific child’s neurological reality constitutes legitimate evidence that cannot be overridden by categorical appeals to “evidence-based practice” averaged across a heterogeneous diagnostic population.
It would need to stop presenting the PDA Society’s guidance and the NCAEP’s behavioural toolkit as compatible options and start treating them as what they are: fundamentally different paradigms requiring fundamentally different stances toward the child, the family, and the meaning of distress.
It would need to stop asking whether PDA is real and start acting on the knowledge it already possesses — knowledge documented in its own internal training materials, watermarked “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE,” describing the very strategies that would have prevented harm to children whose families were begging for exactly those approaches.
Until that happens, POPARD will continue to train consultants on PDA while enabling them to ignore it, will continue to host workshops that ask questions already answered by the organisation’s own materials, and will continue to present ambivalence as intellectual rigour while children whose nervous systems interpret control as threat are subjected to the interventions their own consultants have been taught are harmful.
These FOI records do not exonerate POPARD. They document, in the organisation’s own internal language, the precise architecture of a system designed to absorb knowledge without allowing that knowledge to change practice — while children who love deeply, think fiercely, and feel everything bear the cost of that architecture in classrooms where the experts knew better and chose the chart anyway.
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