I'll be honest, I didn't watch the prog because I felt it was engineered completely for controversy and views rather than having anything interesting to say in itself.
I do think there's absolutely a discussion to be had about how schools could be better resourced to support SEN and ND learners. I don't think it's a particularly niche view that inclusion has never worked especially well because pupils were simply expected to fit in to mainstream classes magically/perhaps with the support of a single, non specialist TA shared between several SEN pupils, without any thought seemingly being paid as to what led to certain pupils being excluded from mainstream education in the first place causing them to need re-including. Because just putting their name on the register and treating them the same as everybody else is not including them. It's quite obviously going to lead to the kinds of issues that caused schools in the past to exclude children or refer them to specialist provision or for children to disengage, play truant, withdraw, or struggle to attend (physically or mentally).
That said, my own personal experience of ADHD medication is that it's been brilliant, both for myself and for my children. (ADHD does run in families.) I still see far more hesitancy and fear and stigma around ADHD medication than makes sense if you look at the actual facts (e.g. the research, the pharmacology, the anecdotal experiences of people who have used it).
I believe this to be because we have been fed in small and large doses a steady drip drip of misinformation and controversy-seeking media content about ADHD medication since roughly the late 1990s. I actually think it had a really huge peak around the millennium/early 00s probably because this was when diagnosis numbers were beginning to rise in the UK and because there was a question about whether it was being overdiagnosed in the US, where they have widely recognised it since the 70s and 80s. Most of us who are parents now are in our 30s and 40s, so when we were seeing this information 20 years ago, we were teens or early 20s and probably didn't know anybody with ADHD. Or if we did, it was that one extremely hyperactive and disruptive child at school, or someone's hyperactive/annoying brother. When something doesn't affect you personally you don't pay a lot of attention to it, but because ADHD was constantly in the news and on talk shows and so on it was a lot of "Is this just an excuse for naughty kids?" "Is it right to treat children with drugs?" "Is it an excuse for poor parenting?" "Don't children just need to run around more?" and lots of narrative which suggested that the drug treatment for ADHD was some kind of sedative which made children easier to manage, or that children are being treated medically for the convenience of adults, or the benefit of adults, not for any benefit to themselves. And this constant drip drip just sort of establishes itself and settles in as part of your general knowledge.
The way our brains establish whether information we receive is reliable or not is partially by checking it against the other information we have seen on that topic and seeing which themes repeat and which ideas come up again and again, and so the more that we hear something, the more we begin to assume it is reliable information. This makes sense - if you think about how we would have processed information before writing and printing presses and so on, it would have all been word of mouth and direct experience. And when you get information by word of mouth and direct experience, the experiences and advice that are generally good are usually the ones which get repeated the most, whereas the outliers that only 1 or 2 people say are probably more likely to be that person's opinion and not necessarily reflective of reality. But it can also be a way that myths and legends form, both in the past (e.g. completely useless folk remedies for common injuries) and also in the modern world where we hear a particular opinion or bit of information so many times that we just assimilate it into our general knowledge and then it's hard to tell something like "ADHD meds are mainly for adult convenience" from "when the clouds are dark grey, it will probably rain soon" or "gravity is the force which makes things fall" or "The president of the USA is Donald Trump" or "dementia is a condition which affects older people and can make them fail to recognise people". We might not even remember specifically where or how we know this information, we just take it for granted - everyone knows that, don't they?
And so yes, I think collectively we have this idea that ADHD medications are very strong, they are intended to control/subdue hyperactive or disruptive or distracted behaviour which gets in the way of the demands of school in particular. They are psychoactive medications, meaning they act on the brain, and that is of particular concern because children's brains are developing so they could potentially harm or disrupt this development, although there is also a general fear that any kind of psychiatric medication can affect personality. There is some awareness of a link to recreational drugs of abuse. Whether relating to this or whether relating to the developmental piece, there is a concern that these medicines could have long term effects, that the long term effects are unknown, that there could be health risks particularly to the heart, or stunted growth, or that the medication itself could be addictive. There is an idea that medication replaces other interventions for ADHD such as therapy, behavioural/parent training, large amounts of physical exercise, closer supervision/support, skills based learning (e.g. meditation, anger management), school based support etc, and as such, that it is a kind of "short cut" to avoid the work or inconvenience involved in those things.
And the thing is that some of that is true. But some of it is wrong. Some of it has a grain of truth but it is exaggerated, highly skewed, or out of context. Some of it is out of date. How do you know which is which? (I am not in UK and about to do school run but will quickly run down which bits are which later on.)
You probably don't unless you look into the literature or read a lot by experts in the field. And the worst thing is that you probably don't know what you don't know. And this is not only parents who have this set of beliefs, it is also your neighbours and your friends and your parents and even people who work closely with children in this context or might have authority to approve or deny referral, such as teachers and GPs.
Sorry, I appreciate this doesn't really answer the question and I will come back and share my experience and my DCs' experiences as well as running through the myths/truths/half-truths. I just think this context is hugely important. A lot of the things that we assume we "know" about ADHD medication are not actually based in good quality evidence, they are based on media narratives from years ago which were deliberately created to stir up discussion and controversy, because that makes for good, entertaining TV in terms of talk shows and so on, and much of this is still ongoing now. While we might be able to recognise what we are seeing in the present day in the context of well OK, this is calibrated to go viral on social media and is very biased, a lot of the background noise or underlying assumptions we hold is stuff that we maybe didn't recognise as that years ago, because we were younger, because the idea of things "going viral" was less widespread, or it maybe didn't feel that relevant to us so we absorbed it less critically, or whatever.