Triage ethics emerges from the battlefield and the hospital ward—places where time, supplies, or personnel are insufficient to meet the full spectrum of need. It offers a bleak calculus: who receives care, who waits, and who is left behind. In emergency medicine, triage may be necessary. In public systems, its presence signals failure.
When scarcity is manufactured—through austerity budgets, administrative bloat, or political neglect—triage becomes not a last resort, but a governing logic. In British Columbia, this logic is palpable: education funding lags behind need, special education services are chronically rationed, and waitlists for assessments and supports stretch for years. What was once an exception becomes routine. Needs are sorted, rationed, and denied not by accident but by design.
Teachers triage students with too few support staff. Counsellors triage trauma with waitlists and part-time hours. Districts triage compliance with the barest nod to inclusion. IEP goals go unmet due to staffing shortages. EA allocations are capped regardless of assessed need. Children are denied psychoeducational assessments because they haven’t “fallen behind enough.” The language is soothing—prioritisation, allocation, efficiency—but the reality is brutal: children’s well-being is being assessed against impossible thresholds, and when they fall short, the cost is lifelong.
This is not about limited resources. It is about limited will.
We are normalising neglect. We are scripting abandonment as pragmatism. And in the process, we are allowing systems to quietly destroy lives under the cover of policy.
Triage ethics, in contexts of abundance hoarded and justice deferred, is not ethics at all. It is institutionalised cruelty in bureaucratic form. The antidote is not better triage—it is refusing to play by the logic of engineered scarcity.
What you can do
Triage ethics, when imported into public education, distorts the purpose of care. It compels teachers, counsellors, and support staff to choose between children—not based on need, but on scarcity masquerading as inevitability. It turns classrooms into clinics of moral erosion, where compassion must be rationed and justice deferred. And yet, within this bleak arithmetic, resistance remains possible.
Care providers cannot single-handedly replenish what governments have withdrawn. But they can interrupt the logic of triage. They can reassert that every child is entitled to support, not sorted by who breaks down most visibly or complies most quietly.
Here are six counter-practices that resist triage ethics in schools:
- Name the scarcity as political, not natural
Do not let resource constraints be framed as neutral fact. Say aloud that these choices are shaped by budgetary decisions, legislative neglect, and policy priorities. This reframes failure as systemic, not personal—and helps build collective solidarity. - Refuse competitive framings of need
Triage ethics pit students against each other, suggesting that only the loudest, the most urgent, or the most compliant deserve care. Instead, advocate for universal design, shared supports, and non-hierarchical access. When asked “who needs it more,” answer: all of them do. - Document unmet needs in structural terms
Keep records of the support you would have offered—if the system had allowed it. Write not just about behaviour, but about lack of staff, time, translation, or sensory access. This creates a counter-narrative of refusal and serves as testimony. - Honour care as relational, not transactional
Even when you cannot fix everything, presence matters. Bearing witness, believing children, refusing punitive framings—these are acts of moral clarity. Care that affirms dignity, even when stretched thin, resists reduction to metrics and checkboxes. - Organise with others to expose moral injury
Teachers and support staff are not the cause of this system—they are among its casualties. Moral injury accrues when professionals are forced to violate their own ethics. Talking about it is not weakness; it is the beginning of revolt. - Teach students the language of justice, not deficiency
Help children name what is happening to them. Teach them to say “I need support” rather than “I’m bad at this.” Give them frameworks—like ableism, austerity, and neurodiversity—to understand themselves and their schools as political spaces, not personal failures.
Care work is always political. But in austerity-era schools, it is also insurgent. Every time you push back against rationed support, reframe a narrative, or document an injustice, you assert that no child should be left to bleed quietly in a hallway because the funding model said so.
In public systems, ethics are made and unmade every day. You can choose not to triage. You can choose to care differently. And in doing so, you may become the breach through which justice begins to re-enter.
Learn more triage ethics
Here are some more writings on this topics
Michael L. Levy et al., “Ethical triage during the COVID‑19 pandemic: a toolkit for neurosurgical resource allocation” (Acta Neurochirurgica, May 2020)
Written at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, this article presents a structured ethical framework for triage in the face of catastrophic resource scarcity. Though focused on neurosurgery, its core insights are transferable to education and other public sectors increasingly forced to make moral decisions under austerity.The authors articulate four guiding principles—prioritising the worst-off, maximising benefits, treating people equally, and valuing instrumental contributions—while warning against discriminatory or utilitarian shortcuts. Their clarity about what should never be used as a basis for triage (such as race, disability, or socioeconomic status) is striking and urgently relevant.In systems where scarcity is constructed rather than accidental, this piece becomes more than medical guidance—it is a moral indictment of policies that render ethical harm routine. PubMed Central – Ethical triage during the COVID‑19 pandemic
Nikhil Goyal, Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty
A devastating ethnographic portrait of three young people navigating a Philadelphia public school system hollowed by austerity. Goyal traces how decades of disinvestment, policing, and neoliberal reforms transformed schools from sites of opportunity into instruments of control and containment.The book documents how staff are forced to triage not just academic needs, but hunger, grief, violence, and trauma—producing what many come to recognise as moral injury: the repeated violation of one’s ethical code under institutional constraint. Penguin Random House – Live to See the Day
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
While not about education exclusively, Brown’s work is foundational in understanding how neoliberal rationality reshapes public institutions. She shows how democratic commitments are eroded when all domains—including schools—are restructured around economic logic.Education becomes investment; students, human capital. Moral questions are subordinated to fiscal metrics. Within this regime, triage is not failure—it is functionality. The book offers crucial language to name the structural violence behind these decisions. Zone Books – Undoing the Demos
Emma Brown, The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe
Though focused on higher education, this work exposes how austerity and privatisation shift the burden of educational access from the state to individuals. Brown tracks policy shifts that gutted public funding and forced schools into impossible choices: raise tuition, cut support, or triage care.The downstream effects—on K-12 access, morale, and equity—are stark. Her interviews reveal educators wracked with guilt, students denied accommodation, and entire institutions co-opted by austerity thinking. HarperCollins – The Debt Trap
