To ask, if you’re a teacher

[Playingvideogames]

How many children in your class are diagnosed with autism or ADHD?

I often see the ‘1%’ quoted, but my anecdata is a lot higher than this.

This isn’t a value judgement thread btw, I’m truly just curious to see the responses and if they align with the ‘official’ statistic.

Totally agree with this. These issues have always existed but giving the learning difficulty a label doesn't solve the issues associated with it.
Whilst putting a name to the problems might be better these days, in my experience SEN students with a good work ethic engage with the prescribed adaptations and do well whereas SEN students who treat the diagnosis as an excuse to give up working in class perform badly.
That's the way it's always been. If a child doesn't try, they don't progress however many accomodations and adaptations a teacher makes.
Parents need to be realistic too. I have known parents complain that their child's diagnosis has only given them entitlement for 15 mins longer on a GCSE. They honestly expected the exam to be made easier in terms of rigour for their child because of their diagnosis.
Seriously- they expected easier questions and more lenient marking!

12% of children in my county are on the ND pathway.

Presumably that includes those already diagnosed and those awaiting diagnosis?

my school sometimes have our hands tied by parents, to be honest, as we can’t add children to the register without parental support. It’s a really complex journey for many parents to accept.

sometimes we identify clear need and parents “don’t want to label” their child, so delay things by years which massively negatively impacts their children’s access to funding they are entitled to and the help they need.

in contrast, we also have parents who insist their child has Sen needs who don’t unfortunately present at school at all because the child is masking, which is very tricky in terms of supporting everyone and getting correct diagnoses and funding

finally we also have parents who fight for a diagnosis because they can’t parent well for a variety of reasons and want a get out clause of “well my child is running around punching others because they have adhd you know, not because I have never enforced boundaries or attended to their needs, oh no, it’s adhd. Now can I have the form so I get more benefits?”.

For the school? No, a diagnosis does not do this.

Thank you. My DH and I would agree, but that doesn’t make it fair does it. Your DH is also lucky to have you to support him and to help him be the best he can be. Child tries so hard to just get on with stuff, but life is quite overwhelming for them at times. I am genuinely very proud of them. So much more difficult than their siblings because of how their brain is wired. But they also have the ability to think outside the box and are great in a crisis! We are trying to support them into financial independence but it’s not easy. They are not even eligible for any benefit financial support as they have savings (from working from 16 to save for a car for work and they don’t go out very often). Also have never considered PIP and have no formal diagnosis.

What does your DH do for a job?

I give up trying to explain why asking a question like this in an anonymous form will not give accurate answers. You didn’t put in title, but loads of people will read the OP and not reply. A lot of work goes into making studies as unbiased as possible.

I see it as a bit of an affront because you don’t state your purpose. Many ND, disabled people spend a lot of time reading about how their diagnosis is made up, diagnosis can be bought, there is an unsustainable level of diagnosis. Weirdly cancer diagnosis is far more common now and we don’t have anything similar about that or blaming the people with cancer.

But equally we accept there has been a true rise in that. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but if the figure of less than 5% was true, at least a few of these replies would reflect that. None of them do.

10 out of 30 in one of my KS2 classes at the moment. Not far off that number in others.

5% is for adhd, autism is also 5%, not necessarily the same 5! You asked for SEND, which includes dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette’s, cerebral palsy, wheelchair users, Down’s syndrome, learning disabilities.

So whose do you want to know? ND or SEND?

Is that ND in particular or all SEN?

There’s a big overlap though - you’d expect it to be 8% if you consider even one or two in every class overlap.

But not a single reply here is that low, bar one. Most of them are many times higher.

Because as researchers and statisticians know, people are more likely to respond to a question like this if they have a larger number. If they have none then they are less likely to respond.

You cannot extrapolate any useful data on increase or rates based on replies on an anonymous forum.

I want the laughing emoji back!! 😂

(Only because this post is so true 🤪)

I extrapolated it from my own experience and just wanted to know if others experience similarly. It seems they do. I simply don’t believe 5% of children have ASD when no real life scenario reflects this. Maybe somebody reading who teaches will tell me otherwise?

I give up. What you are asking for is anecdotal stories that you have no way of knowing if true. And you aren’t considering the bias in answering.

You can not believe it all you like, the 5% statistic is based on actual data from NHS/DfE. Not asking opinions on the internet.

You can not believe in gravity if you like, still makes it real.

I'm genuinely asking - does the NHS data include only those diagnosed? Because at the moment in my area they are taking over 6 months to even triage referrals. The waiting lists for children are enormous. It used to be perfectly possible to get referred end of Y2 and prescribed medication if needed by summer term of Y3. Now those same children are waiting until Y6. That's a lot of primary children in the system without a diagnosis.

Yes it does. Some studies look at probable figures based on calculations of waiting lists.

Where I live there is a 10 year wait for CAMHs who carry out the diagnosis for children. Most children will age out of the system.

The DfE data is based on schools reporting SEND lists. You don’t need a diagnosis to begin that, it is dependent on whether the school thinks there are needs to be addressed.

Im not saying that there are potentially more than 5% in population. But the actual amount cannot be calculated from an an anonymous, biased, internet forum.

7 diagnosed in one of my maths classes (FE) No support. I suspect 2 of the other boys have ADHD too.

I don’t see why some posters are taking offence at what is an objective question.

I am not seeing the responses as offence but perhaps frustration because you are not being anywhere near as objective as you think you are and you keep jumping to pattern confirmation when the numbers on this thread are much too small to draw a conclusion like that. What this kind of data in this kind of thread can give you is an idea of the range of experiences, but not the number/distribution. So if you see at least one response saying they have taught classes with 0-2 students with these diagnoses, that is an experience that exists (assuming we take all posts at face value and assume that nobody is lying or making up a completely random answer, which people do BTW). But it's unlikely to be accurate to be able to extrapolate well, only one person said that and everyone else said it's 20-40% so 20-40% must be more frequent. You can't accurately gauge that from a forum discussion thread.

Also - there are people responding just saying ADHD/Autism, some referring to all ND, some referring to all SEND. These are not the same thing, so it's confusing the numbers and making them not really comparable. The 1% in the OP is related to autism, I think? Whereas official SEND figures are about 20% so already extremely different to the 1% because that 1% is only one presentation of SEND needs, most of which are not related to autism.

There are some responding with diagnosed figures, some responding with suspected numbers. Some are responding with a whole school figure, an average, or their current class and some are responding with classes they have known of or had experience of in previous years. As some other posters have said, there's a psychological thing where when responses are open for everyone to read, it tends to put people off responding if their answer would be extremely different to the other responses (probably becuse it induces doubt about the validity of the answer) and I also think conversely, people feel more drawn to respond if they would be the first person to report a particular extreme, rather than repeating what others have already said, so someone with this experience might be more likely to respond. Because of the small nature of class sizes, you can't get any more extreme than 1/0 pupils in the downward direction, so people might be more inclined to post if the current max is 10 and they have experienced 13 (to borrow one example).

He's a university lecturer which suits him because it's a very clear hierarchy and he's a specialist in something niche, lucrative (for the university), specialist and kind of boring sounding so they mostly leave him alone and let the fees come rolling in! He has lovely colleagues (including a guy who specialises in blowing things up for safety reasons 😂) and kind motherly admin staff. He's a lucky man!

Infant teacher - 29 in class. No diagnosed ADHD. 3 currently have a diagnosis for ASD and another 2 are currently on the wait list. I also have another one who clearly is ASD but parents believe it’s developmental. I think I have at least 30% but possibly as high as 50% neurodiverse.

A previous class I had a couple of years ago had 28% diagnosed for ASD/ ADHD or going for diagnosis by the end of the infants.

No, that’s on the pathway to diagnosis. Diagnosed children are not counted in this measure.

I teach 10 year olds in a private school. Very few officially diagnosed autistic or adhd. Having said that, there's always at least one child in my class (25-30 kids) that I know has one of said conditions but parents aren't willing to consider it.

C.40% of our year 11 cohort have SEN, and over half of those are ND.
I have one class where a third of the class have NDs.
Nice leafy wealthy area, very little deprivation.
It's a teaching nightmare and the exam arrangements for GCSE are logistically impossible. Once you add the medical conditions needing access arrangements (eg snacks for diabetics) it's almost half of all the candidates.