Deferral

Deferral is the institutional habit of delay disguised as care—the meeting postponed, the support re-evaluated, the plan pushed to next term—until urgency drains into silence and the child’s needs become background noise.

In education systems, deferral functions as a tactic of control and containment; it maintains procedural legitimacy while exhausting families, stretching them across weeks and months of waiting, requesting, re-requesting, and re-justifying what was already clear.

To name deferral is to refuse the slow erosion of hope disguised as process—it is to insist that timeliness is a matter of dignity, that postponement produces harm, and that no child can learn while their survival is held in suspension.