UIP and the business of education

Vancouver’s Urgent Intervention Process—once called the Multi-Disciplinary Intervention Support Team, or MIST—was designed to respond when schools reached the limits of their capacity to support a child in crisis. The name once suggested a circle of professionals surrounding a child with care. As the system evolved, it became the Urgent Intervention Program, still implying at least a budget, a team, and measurable goals. Finally, it was renamed the Urgent Intervention Process—a linguistic trail marking the evaporation of relationship into procedure. Each stage of renaming reflected a deepening abstraction, until what had once been an intervention became merely an administrative event.

The children who end up in what the Vancouver School Board calls the Urgent Intervention Process are rarely there by accident. They arrive after every routine measure has failed, after the standard accommodations have proven too shallow, after a sequence of polite meetings has yielded little but fatigue. These are the children whose needs sit outside the procedural imagination of the system—children whose regulation, safety, or learning cannot be contained by its usual templates.

Families often understand what would help long before the professionals do. They know the triggers, the sensory landscapes, the fragile cues of distress that the paperwork misses. Yet once the situation is formally designated a process, that knowledge is displaced. Expertise becomes procedural. The child’s needs are reinterpreted as steps to be followed, boxes to be checked, timelines to be met. The process exists to serve the institution’s need for coherence, not the child’s need for connection.

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A process designed to protect adults

The irony of the Urgent Intervention Process is that it is framed as a support mechanism for staff—a way to help teachers manage complex situations. But this framing reveals its true orientation. The process centres adult relief, not child regulation. It offers teachers a structure, a way to demonstrate they have done everything possible. It soothes institutional anxiety while leaving the deeper problem untouched: classrooms designed without sufficient staffing, training, or flexibility to hold the nervous systems of neurodivergent children.

This structure, however unintentionally, redefines failure. The child becomes the disturbance; the teacher becomes the one who must be rescued. When help arrives, it is help for the adults, not the student. The message is implicit but devastating: that the classroom’s breakdown belongs to the teacher’s competence, not to a system that keeps educators chronically under-supported and unequipped to meet the complexity of human difference.

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The myth of expert intervention

It is also profoundly patronising to the teachers themselves. The model assumes that a specialist—some itinerant psychologist or consultant—can enter a classroom where exhaustion hangs in the air and deliver a recipe for regulation. This, too, is a fantasy born of managerial culture: that expertise can be parachuted in, delivered in professional language, and documented as a measurable intervention. But emotional containment, safety, and trust are not transmissible commodities. They require relationship, time, and presence—the very elements stripped from classrooms by austerity and standardisation.

The truth is that most teachers already know that compliance-based strategies are temporary sedatives. They produce stillness, not safety. They are the adult equivalent of covering one’s ears during a fire alarm. But in the absence of training, staffing, or systemic accountability, compliance becomes the only language available—the only way to survive a day in a class that feels on the edge of collapse.

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What relationship once meant

When I first encountered the MIST team, the predecessor to this process, it was through a person, not a procedure. A psychologist, or perhaps a counsellor—it hardly matters which—took the time to speak with me. She listened, she asked questions, she treated our family’s insight as knowledge. That relationship, fragile and brief as it was, marked a kind of inclusion that cannot be legislated. It was a conversation built on reciprocity.

What my children have lacked since then is not an intervention plan or a new acronym. They have lacked adults who communicate from a neurodiversity-affirming stance—who recognise that regulation grows out of trust, that a few check-ins a day can hold a life together. These gestures are small, unremarkable, nearly invisible to the system’s accounting. Yet they are the architecture of actual support.

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The consulting logic of public education

When a process replaces a team, language reveals ideology. In the world of consulting, defining a restrictive process is how one limits cost and scope. The fewer steps you authorise, the fewer hours you must pay for. It is a strategy of containment, not care.

Public education has absorbed this rhetoric wholesale. Schools are encouraged to emulate business models, to optimise, to measure, to demonstrate efficiency of their investment in education. But children are not clients, and learning is not a deliverable. When a district reframes crisis response as a process rather than a relationship, it transforms care into transaction. The child becomes a case; the intervention becomes a product; and success is defined by procedural completion rather than human restoration.

This is how austerity disguises itself: in the neutral language of process.

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The cost of procedural compassion

By turning support into a series of steps, the system limits its own moral liability. Each stage—referral, consultation, interim plan—creates the appearance of action while diluting responsibility. The process becomes the evidence of diligence. If the student remains dysregulated, it is no longer a system failure; it is merely an outcome beyond the process’s scope.

Yet those outcomes have a trajectory. A child who cannot find regulation in elementary school rarely discovers it unaided in adolescence. When disengagement sets in, it travels forward—to high school absences, to early withdrawal, to mental health crises, to contact with other government systems that cost exponentially more and heal far less. The price of this procedural minimalism will eventually be paid by another ministry, another budget line, another generation of advocates.

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The end of universality

The transformation from team to process in public education mirrors a much larger societal trend — the erosion of universal systems. Whether in health care, income support, or schooling, we are watching public institutions migrate from rights-based frameworks to conditional models of access.

It is the same logic that animates efforts to means-test Old Age Security or privatise once-public services. The rhetoric of “efficiency” and “targeting support to those who need it most” conceals the dismantling of collective entitlement. Universality is painted as wasteful; compassion becomes a line item to be rationed.

Public education has suffered the same fate. Instead of offering robust, equitable support for all learners, the system has been downgraded until only those without alternatives remain fully inside it. The affluent quietly opt out — into private schooling, tutoring, or specialist programs — leaving behind a public system stretched to its limit and stripped of its most influential advocates. The absence of those voices ensures the decline will deepen.

When care becomes conditional, it ceases to be care. When access depends on process compliance rather than human need, the system begins to mistake exclusion for efficiency.

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Why universality matters

Universal systems create solidarity. They make us interdependent. They ensure that the same mechanisms that serve the most vulnerable also serve the most privileged — which is precisely why they remain funded, defended, and dignified.

The Urgent Intervention Process is what happens when universality collapses. Support becomes a privilege of crisis, rationed through bureaucracy rather than offered as a baseline condition of schooling. Families must prove need, justify distress, endure delay, and survive procedural exhaustion just to access what should have been available from the start: safety, stability, and belonging.

Do we believe in systems that hold everyone, or only those who can document their suffering convincingly enough to qualify? They get what they get and they don’t get upset.

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Beyond the process

Inclusion cannot be engineered through procedural rigour. It requires the human infrastructure that once existed when care was shared across roles rather than delegated to forms. Teachers need training, certainly, but they also need time, co-regulation, and the assurance that inclusion is not an act of personal heroism performed in isolation. Families must be treated as collaborators, not as sources of complaint. And children must encounter adults who interpret their distress as communication, not defiance.

As a business analyst, I would tell you there is no universal process capable of delivering the same outcome for every client. Each context demands its own discernment, its own human calibration. But the education system, in its naïve quest to professionalise itself—hampered by bureaucracy and by the melancholy of consensus, which so rarely produces joy—has mistaken codification for competence. In defining a process so rigid that it excludes discretion, it has ossified the very capacity for care.

We could name the sequence outright:

• Codify – to turn lived practice into rule, freezing improvisation into protocol.
• Ossify – to harden that rule until it loses flexibility; what once moved with the body of experience becomes bone.
• Reify – to make something abstract appear self-evident, so that the process itself replaces the human experience it was meant to serve.

What began as accountability has calcified into ritual compliance. The documentation of support substitutes for support itself. The process has become the product; the checklist now eclipses the child.

We made all this up. We can unmake it too. But that requires questioning the entire pursuit of treating education like a business—a system obsessed with efficiency over empathy, metrics over meaning.

Some children—such as some refugees or those who have endured trauma or chronic exclusion—require twenty times the resources of their peers. That imbalance is not failure; it is precisely why public education exists. The purpose of a universal system is not sameness, but sufficiency.

The Urgent Intervention Process is not evil. It is what happens when an institution forgets its purpose is to hold people, not to manage them. To reclaim inclusion, we must unlearn the logic of process and return to relationship: the willingness to stay, to listen, to evolve together, even when the cost resists quantification.