“The image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled” - Jean Vanier

I write this at the end of a memorable day.

At 6am on Wednesday last week, I woke to the news that Professor Stephen Hawking had died and I was immediately filled with a sense of sadness. As soon as I came downstairs, I told my son and then showed him my first-edition copy of A Brief History of Time, Hawking’s international bestseller. I tried to read it as a teenager and failed to understand any of it, but that book and Hawking, a peerless communicator of complex ideas, were major influences in my decisions to read physics at university and to become a physics teacher.

Aidan and I chatted about Hawking at the breakfast table and he commented that “I’ll bet there are loads of people with a similar disability to Stephen Hawking who people underestimate, and no one’s ever realised how capable they could be or what they could do before they became ill.” The boy is right.

By 3pm, I was sitting in the staffroom of a special school in London with a couple of colleagues and a visitor from a primary school who had just had a tour. We were all busy discussing what our visitor had chatted about with Aisha - a teenager who uses an eye-gaze machine to communicate. These wonderful devices track where the user is looking on the screen and they can select an icon by staring at a point for a period of time, blinking or clicking a switch. We reflected on the fact that Aisha did not have access to this technology until she came to this secondary school. One of my colleagues began to realise that Aisha was desperate to communicate and perhaps her capabilities had, up until that point, been underestimated, and so it proved to be.

Aisha asked my visitor some questions in quick succession and our visitor was so impressed with the speed of her sentence construction that he took an interest in how Aisha was putting her sentences together: “I see how it’s organised. Aisha has a section there for pronouns. Most of the kids I teach don’t know what pronouns are.”

We were trying to imagine what it must be like to go through your entire primary school life desperate to communicate and contribute yet being unable to get your point across; unable to advocate for yourself; unable to express your preferences for dinner, clothes, music; and having everyone around you make all of your choices for you.

“Society shuns weakness and glorifies strength” - Jean Vanier

Hawking was an outlier, both in terms of his longevity by living with motor neurone disease for more than 50 years, as well as his academic prowess. His undoubted intellect was well established by the time he was diagnosed, and he was able to continue his work, with suitable support, because motor neurone disease didn’t impair his cognitive abilities. In contrast, my concern about many of the children I work with is that society has little or no expectations of them.

What worries me even more is that some of us in our profession may be doing the same. Aisha is a perfect example of that. Parents aside, we must be the adults in our students’ lives who have sky-high expectations of them. Not everyone is going to be a cosmologist - that’s not the point - but surely we want all of the children that are in our care to leave us in a position to make the best of themselves.

The crucial lesson for teachers is that the example of Hawking does illustrate how any and all people can be supported to be the best person they can be when their needs are well understood, and the world around them is reasonably adapted to ensure those needs are met. These are not luxuries and we mustn’t regard efforts to meet their needs as such. On the contrary, what we should be doing is our utmost to provide children with their basic entitlement.

At 10.30pm, I finished the day in tears. I was sad about the death of Stephen Hawking, but I’m deeply upset when I think about the wasted years that Aisha has had to endure before my colleagues were able to assist her to find her voice. Let’s ensure we don’t place unnecessary limits on the potential of the children with whom we work.

“As soon as we start selecting and judging people instead of welcoming them as they are - with their sometimes hidden beauty, as well as their more frequently visible weaknesses - we are reducing life, not fostering it.” - Jean Vanier

Jarlath O’Brien works in special schools in London. His book Better Behaviour: A Guide for Teachers will be published in May