I was recently thinking about the use of labels in education, and what the upsides and downsides of diagnosis are. Are diagnoses limiting or are they empowering?

As I write this, I am forcing myself to remember what life was like before I worked in special education. I worked in a very inclusive comprehensive (surely all comprehensive schools are inclusive by definition, Jarlath? Discuss), and it was common for us to take students with a wide range of needs who’d had to leave other comprehensives.

I remember I taught a child with Down’s syndrome for one year. I say “taught”, but I am ashamed to say that the reality was that I leant far too heavily on a teaching assistant to do my work for me, an issue that is explored in Rob Webster’s recent research. Still, I came across one child with Down’s syndrome in five years in a school of 1,200 students.

Using knowledge to support needs

The school of 128 students that I work at now has over 20 children with Down’s syndrome and I’ve chatted to ten of them this morning before 9 o’clock. The point here is that in that comprehensive I could have gone another 10 years without teaching another child with that condition. I knew very little about Down’s syndrome, but the label was very important. It helped me know where to start. The majority of teachers may only teach children with complex conditions once in a blue moon. I needed to know that all people with Down’s syndrome have a degree of learning difficulty and delayed development; often have visual and hearing problems; and that they may have shortened digits that may lead to poor fine motor control, among other issues. These things directly impact upon teaching and learning and without that knowledge I would seriously disadvantage that child. Does it mean that I viewed all children with Down’s syndrome as the same? No. A child has Down’s syndrome. They are not a Down’s child.

Just like you, I am sure, I also taught children with Tourette’s, autism, ADHD and OCD. All of these children were prey to lazy stereotype which, as a profession, we must be on our guard against. But knowing that those children had those conditions informed my approach to teaching them and that gets to the heart of the matter. How do we use our knowledge about that child to support their needs?

There are things that you must know about my daughter’s eye condition and the challenges it may present to her and you in the classroom. She is blind in her right eye; she wears a prosthesis which she may need to take out; she will hold a book at a funny angle - correcting her for this means that she may be unable to read properly; seating her on the wrong side of the classroom means she will be less able to see the board, etc. You can forget the medical label of “persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous”. Just understand what it means for your teaching and adjust accordingly.

Understanding the nature of difficulties

A diagnosis serves a number of purposes - it informs our teaching; it helps the parents understand the nature of the difficulties (they are desperate to help, remember, and are seeking to learn more about how to do that); and it can help obtain support in the form of an EHCP and funding if needed.

Without it we are vulnerable to emotional, ill-informed responses. I recall vividly the social media response from teachers when a documentary on Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) went out on Channel 4 - Born Naughty? In episode one, we met a nine-year-old who had been permanently excluded from school after threatening to kill other pupils and a six-year-old who had violent tantrums at the slightest thing. Comment after comment blamed “permissive teachers”, “poor parenting” and “naughty children who just didn’t want to be told no”. Without the understanding of a child’s needs informing how we work with them and how we best support their needs there is always the possibility that a certain proportion of children will be written off in this way.

We should ensure that we don’t define children by a label or diagnosis, but we must ensure that we are informed by them.

Jarlath O’Brien is headteacher of Carwarden House Community School in Surrey and the author of Don’t Send Him in Tomorrow, published by Independent Thinking Press