This isn’t a unique case, is it?

My children’s father said in a meeting: “Surely you’ve dealt with this before and you have a solution? This isn’t a unique case, is it?” The question hung in the air, simple and devastating, exposing in one breath the entire pretence on which school leadership rests.

The question matters because it cuts through bureaucratic delay and the endless rhetoric of “complex cases” and “challenging behaviours.” It insists on memory. It resists the seductive performance of institutional amnesia. It shifts responsibility back where it belongs—onto systems designed to serve, but which instead perform ignorance in order to justify inaction.

And it reveals something about gendered roles: that after years of relentless maternal labour, of circling through every advocacy channel available, a father that struggles to get to meetings could still drop one sentence so piercing in its clarity that it crystallised the systemic truth, even if nothing changed.

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The myth of novelty in institutional harm

Schools narrate every crisis as though it were born that morning, as though no other child had ever hidden in the coat room, no other mother had ever begged for support, no other teacher had ever watched a classroom unravel under the weight of exclusion.

This performance of novelty protects the institution from accountability: if harm is unprecedented, then no precedent can guide the response. The myth of uniqueness allows staff to shrug their shoulders, to imply helplessness, to delay until the family absorbs the cost of collapse.

Sara Ahmed reminds us in The Promise of Happiness that institutions maintain their image by assigning unhappiness to those who complain. The mother becomes the origin of discord, the child becomes the source of disruption, and the institution continues untouched. The invocation of novelty is a strategy of disavowal: if every complaint is new, then none require cumulative remedy. What looks like incompetence is actually a practiced technique for reproducing inequality.

The revolving door of parental exhaustion

Every September a new cohort of children arrives, and with them a new cohort of parents, each learning from the beginning how hard it is to secure support, each discovering the polite evasions and strategic silences that seasoned families already know too well.

If you asked me plainly what I would do when a child is struggling in kindergarten, I would say to take them out—because removal can be an act of protection, a refusal to offer your child’s body and spirit to an institution that will otherwise learn to treat their distress as routine.

By the time a parent learns the rhythm of advocacy, her child has moved on, and the institution greets the next family as if the pattern were freshly discovered. Schools exploit this turnover, facing each new mother as though the history of harm has been erased, as though she alone carries an impossible burden that is actually structural.

Ahmed’s analysis of complaint in Complaint! helps us see how institutions tire families out: the slow pace, the lost files, the rotating staff are not failures of efficiency but techniques of attrition.

To make families start again every year is to make injustice durable. It is to produce exhaustion as a form of governance. Schools being designed for exhaustion ensures that no parent can ever leverage history as a force for accountability, because history is structurally disallowed from entering the room.

And within families, that revolving door of exhaustion almost always pulls mothers in—because women have been socialised to endure, to persist, to stay at the table even when the table is hostile. Fathers often disengage, declaring futility, while mothers circle endlessly, absorbing harm in the hope that persistence might eventually secure care.

The refusal to build institutional memory

If schools carried memory with them, they would be compelled to admit the repetition of harm. Instead, they allow knowledge to dissipate—staff retire or move on, principals rotate, files are archived or lost or not written in the first place, and every story of collapse is treated as a private tragedy rather than a public lesson.

The refusal to accumulate wisdom becomes a strategy in itself: harm remains survivable only for the individual family that bears it, rather than serving as evidence that should transform practice. Each child becomes the prototype of a problem already solved elsewhere, but denied recognition here.

Legal scholars like J. Shahar Dillbary and Thomas J. Miceli remind us that deterrence depends on recognition of patterns. In their economic analysis of punishment and liability, repetition without systemic correction is evidence not of ignorance but of preference.

If institutions refuse to learn, it is because the cost of harm has been successfully externalised—borne by families rather than by the province. The absence of institutional memory is not neutral; it is a deliberate transfer of liability.

Ahmed too reminds us in Complaint! that compliance is maintained by dispersal: each grievance treated as an isolated crack rather than as evidence of a collapsing structure. What we face in education is not a failure to collect data but a refusal to treat data as cumulative truth. And in a gendered lens, what we face is the spectacle of mothers forced to repeat the same truth until our voices wear thin, while men can remain mostly silent, entering occasionally with a single incisive comment that slices through the veneer of novelty, only to leave again without bearing the endless repetition.

What it would mean to admit repetition

To say, “This is not unique,” would mean accepting that the institution has failed in the same way many times before. It would mean acknowledging that exclusion is not a rare misfortune but a predictable outcome of underfunding, ableism, and a disciplinary culture that treats difference as deficit.

It would mean that solutions are possible, because they already exist, and the refusal to use them is a choice. To admit repetition would require abandoning the shield of novelty and instead facing the collective demand to act with competence, justice, and memory.

Dillbary and Miceli suggest that accountability only functions when institutions bear the costs of failing to prevent harm. At present, schools externalise those costs onto parents—who lose work hours, who bear psychological strain, who provide substitute support in place of trained professionals. To acknowledge repetition would be to acknowledge liability, and with it the need for restitution.

Ahmed insists that repetition is a feminist tool: to repeat complaints is to insist that they are real, that they accumulate, that they mark the institution whether or not it admits them.

To say “this isn’t a unique case” is to join a chorus that institutions try to keep silent. It is to turn the revolving door into a gathering place.

And when we view this through gender, it becomes clear that the labour of repetition—of remembering, of documenting, of insisting—has been overwhelmingly feminised, forced onto mothers as an unchosen role, while men’s occasional interventions are treated as authoritative simply because they are rare.

Conclusion

That single question remains with me, sharper than any of the endless reports or minutes or letters: “This isn’t a unique case, is it?” It reveals the lie at the centre of institutional self-preservation, the lie that harm is accidental, unpredictable, unprecedented.

The truth is simpler and heavier: these are patterns. They are known. They are lived, repeatedly, by children and families who deserve more than amnesia and delay. To ask the question is to strip the institution of its defences, to insist that what we face is systemic, and to declare that the solutions are already here, waiting for courage.

Ahmed teaches us that complaint is a form of feminist survival; Dillbary and Miceli remind us that accountability requires systemic recognition of repetition. Taken together, these insights illuminate what families already know in our bodies: harm is repeated not because it is unsolvable but because its costs are misallocated.

To admit repetition is to admit responsibility, and to admit responsibility is to open the door to justice. And when we centre gender, we see clearly how that responsibility has been shifted not only from schools to families, but within families onto women—who carry the burden of advocacy until we are wrung dry, while men remain free to step aside, their rare words cutting and true but never accompanied by the endless labour of circling the table.