More SEN, better diagnosis, lack of funding or a combination?

I do think that more is diagnosed, rather than more existing now. Even back in the 90s, Autism "didn't exist" for girls. Dyslexia wasn't believed to exist by many teachers and those who were were very advanced with their studies, but had no social skills were just Nerds rather than people with autistic traits.

I also think we are seeing the results of genetic damage from lifestyle factors from the 1940s-1960s, where smoking and exposure to other chemicals were much more common. Don’t forget that your eggs were made whilst your mum was pregnant with you, as women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have. Which means the eggs that made my children were made when my grandmother was pregnant with my mum.

I thought evidence from countries where prenatal genetic screening is commonplace for e.g. Down’s syndrome reveal that actually fewer children are being born with severe genetic abnormalities, as women choose to abort?

I don’t buy that there are more children with difficulties in the public view because previously they were hidden away. I don’t think anyone has given any data to support that, and we aren’t talking about the 1950s, we’re talking about the 1990s.

I do think we should be looking closely at the quality of parenting. You can’t deny that screen time for babies and young children has massively increased over the past 20 years, and we need to either rule that out or understand the effects properly.

Apologies - since this thread has gone the way of many others (ie with a few posters focusing on non-speaking autistics), I was talking about those in terms of the numbers. Should've made that clear.

My Df is clearly dyslexic but left school before his exams with low literacy. He was labelled as naughty and spent a lot of time being caned. More severe needs were met at special schools. Also we didn't have the Internet, projectors so lessons didn't inovle 24 pages of powerpoint instructions (which is overwhelming), teachers weren't requried to ensure their lesson covered learning obejctives, do nows, interleaving, blended learning, independent tasks, their two vocab, challenge for the more able and talented, deep questioning, formative assessment, plenery's and much more..... it's too much. Kids go from one all singing all dancing lesson to the next and they are exhausted. Also video games, 24hr streaming of anything you want to watch, the whole internet, their own mobile devices. Kids are overestimated and unimpressed by education. I remember it being very exciting when they wheeled the TV out at school or the textbook had a colour photo. Nowadays, many kids aren't interested in anything unless it's inane rubbish on tik tok and they don't have the attention span to focus. They just sit there like zombies saying 'what do I write'.

Let's rewind to when I was in school in the 80's. Cane behind the board to basically ensure you sat still and listened, big walk of over 1 mile each way to school and back each day with all of your friends, so plenty of exercise and lots of time to destress , longer playtimes, more playtimes (break morning and afternoon), proper dinner hour, lots of art, lots of music, lots of sports. Actually FUN LEARNING IN SCHOOL - project work, preparing for school plays, learning the recorder.

I think the point many are trying to make is that the needs of a big cohort of children appear to have significantly increased. I can assure you that my DC (and most of her classmates from her special school) wouldn't have coped any better or flown under the radar in the scenario you describe simply because the needs are far too obvious and severe. Even school admits that the cohort changes in the last 10 years completely as there wasn't such a big number of children with complex needs 15 years ago.

This review suggests an increase in prevalence but attributes it to changes in diagnostic criteria and methodology of the studies it reviewed.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=increase+in+autism+prevalence&oq=increase+in+autis#d=gs_qabs&t=1704696606389&u=%23p%3DmJKrzguLtpkJ

OK, cards on the table: a big part of the reason I'm sceptical is that nobody in the thread (thus far) has actually shown trustworthy numbers detailing the scale of this "increase". It's just a hand-wavey "I've seen..." and that's it - it's all anecdotal.

I couldn't find anything useful on Google, either.

Does anybody have anything concrete?

As a child I knew every single family in our street and most of the families in the few streets nearby. By knew I mean I knew the name of everyone who lived there and often a bit about them. There was not one single child hidden at home.
As a teenager I worked with children with complex needs. All were in special schools, none were hidden at home, even those who were non verbal as teenagers.
There was a ward in the local mental hospital where a lot of these children went for respite and a tiny number of children lived there full time. But the vast majority were at home and attending special schools. This was in the late eighties.
Eighties and nineties saw the closure of the old institutions and children were moved out of them. My DP worked as a support worker in the 90s within a house where adults who had lived in institutions now lived. These were people who could never manage to live independently. The houses where in ordinary streets, they were not hidden away by the early nineties.

I do remember watching a programme years ago about medical advances happening that meant that babies born under 28 weeks could now survive. Whereas before babies under 28 weeks surviving were miracle babies as it was so rare. The programme said that many, although not all of these babies would be left with some kind of SN as a result of being born so early.

That is interesting about the increase in non verbal children with ASD. I am aware personally of three friends with young children with this.
Is there any decent research that says why this might be?

Better awareness and diagnosis is certainly a huge factor - I’ve no doubt that there are many adults who should have been identified as ND when they were younger but were probably just labelled quiet, naughty, awkward, difficult, whatever. However, I work in early years and there is no doubt that over the last 15 years my colleagues and myself have witnessed a rapid rise in children with additional needs. It’s definitely occurring more and I’ve spoken to medical professionals who say the same. I’m really not sure what could be causing it. We have certainly reached the stage in our setting where ND outnumbers NT.

With adhd some kids can sit still in a quiet calm environment where they are working by themself. So more old fashioned classrooms
Put the same child next to a friend where friend and other kids messing about and -- mayhem.

Expectations to work through pages of math quickly for eg.

When i was at school 80-90 there was obviously tv but
Only certain times of day was kids prog. I didnt have own tv. My dad had tv from maybe 6:30 on. And from sat afternoon.

And yes obviously no out of school activities. I didnt even go out with mates as school far away.

The smoking argument doesn’t even make sense. Surely less people smoke in every successive generation, so ASD would have peaked in about the 1930s?

I guess there's no selection anymore as we have become so technologically advanced.
What about egg donor children, do we yet know any effects of being in the womb of a different mother / people with 3 parents genetically?

It seems as well autism is an umbrella term, as is adhd, for probably many many different genetic variations.

Def the Internet plus changing social attitudes mean more babies of nd couples so much protection of recessive genes likely gone increasing severity.

Age of parents causing new, maybe as yet unknown, conditions due to egg deterioration or low quality sperm replication.

As well as chemicals in upf food and the water, plus sweeteners, we have no idea of the long term effects we haven't been using them long enough.

Environment
Dna changes
Smoking.
Overweight parents
Inherited

Smoking grandmothers can increase asd in gc.
But logically they are also more likelt to have adhd too

Both sides have a very heavy smoker in. .

The last generation a lot more have gone to uni dividing into grads and non grads.

Possbly pairing up adhd/adhd people and others into asd/asdcouples

Actually bil is very hyper too and his dad smoked a lot!

If it is obesity causing some of the increase and parental age thats going to be very bad news...

This is what I see.

Every teacher and early years professional I have spoken to about this says the number of children with non verbal ASD is skyrocketing. I don’t know why it is seen as unpalatable to state the truth. Only by acknowledging the issue and getting to grips with the scale of it can force the government to do something in terms of provision and finding out why this is happening.

and I agree completely with this.

Exactly. It’s such a clear and undeniable increase yet people are still denying it. Denying it isn’t going to help support get put in place. We need better diagnostic pathways, more specialist schools, more training and time for staff supporting these kids in mainstream and to start looking into why this is happening so we can help prevent this crisis worsening.

I wonder if it’s unpalatable for some posters because of Andrew Wakefield etc and it therefore (rightfully) now seeming controversial to say something is increasing the prevalence of autism. While we now know it’s not vaccines there are definitely other factors causing this increase.

This is it. Of course there were institutions, but nothing like the number needed to hide the number of disabled children we see now. There are more special schools now than ever before as @x2boys said and yet the overspill into mainstream is huge.

Every teacher and early years professional I have spoken to about this says the number of children with non verbal ASD is skyrocketing. I don’t know why it is seen as unpalatable to state the truth. Only by acknowledging the issue and getting to grips with the scale of it can force the government to do something in terms of provision and finding out why this is happening.

And the autism scandal is still happening in care homes now, by another name. For those with profound needs.

The last long stay institution for those with learning disabilities closed in 2009. It was called Orchard Hill. Watch ‘The Silent Minority’ ITV documentary from 1981 on YouTube. Yes the children were absolutely being hidden in the 1980’s.

They were, but that doesn’t explain the increase from the 90s/ 00s and even early 2010s to now. Growing up in the 90s I knew 1 severely autistic kid who was sent out of county. But now at work I meet multiple kids like him in mainstream every week. Sometimes several I’m one mainstream reception class. There’s absolutely no way there was the number we see now but kept out of public sight.

Meanwhile the complex needs schools near me are having to constantly expand their preverbal autism classes to not even close to meet demand.

They were not hidden at home, they were often 'put out of their misery' at birth which just would not happen now, or institutionalised and the family did not talk about it. Ever, especially to siblings. A parent might visit or not.

Very very different to the other extreme we have now of many telling siblings of stillbirths or even late miscarriages and remembering yearly as part of the family.

Half a century ago children with SEN were put into different schools called ESN schools (Educationally Sub Normal). Seems barbaric.

I can’t take this further as you’re now arguing against a narrative that isn’t even real.