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.

This is a great point. I am diagnosed autistic, but have always been open to the idea that my brain has been 'wired' into autistic patterns by a traumatic childhood. However there is also a high prevalence of ND in my family, so it could be genetic

I’m not a teacher but I am an AHP who works in schools and it probably averages out at about 20% of the kids are diagnosed with ADHD/ autism in the classes I go into these days. Obviously some classes have higher rates and others lower.

I have been in my job for 16 years and I am slightly concerned that we seem to have lost the nuances of diagnosis as the current focus is so strongly on autism/ ADHD.

For example, I strongly suspect several children on my caseload actually have foetal alcohol syndrome however this has never even been a consideration or the possibility of this discussed with parents.

I have a family in which all the children have been diagnosed with ADHD (and autism in one case) however these children have had very difficult lives, are currently in foster care and unfortunately the sibling group has also been split up for the first time but yet the affects of trauma and attachment issues is always glazed over to focus on neurodiversity being the cause of all their behavioural issues.

I also have a group of children who present with ADHD symptoms but they could potentially be attributed to external factors. For example, I’ve noticed that many of their parents are very loving and caring but also very risk adverse and do not allow climbing/ jumping etc, the kids spend a lot of time indoors and the kids are often very weak. As a result they often look like they are fidgeting or get up and move about when they should be sitting but it’s actually because their core is so weak they can’t maintain sitting still for very long particularly when unsupported, e.g when sitting on the floor. A lot of these kids spend an awful lot of time on screens and whereas in the past they would have been sent outside to play for a few hours, parents now don’t feel it’s safe to do this and so a screen holds their attention. Unfortunately this can also impact their sleep which again has an effect on their attention and concentration.

I have (predominantly girls) who in the past would have been diagnosed with anxiety however it’s now really rare to have a child referred with that diagnosis and it seems to generally be an autism diagnosis instead. Some people find this a really positive thing but it concerns me that in the past we would have done anxiety management with the child however now it’s just seen as part of their autism and generally accommodations are made to reduce the source of their anxiety instead however in my experience it’s resulted in many children avoiding any stressors altogether which creates this vicious cycle in which their anxiety gets worse rather than better.

I have also now had a couple of children who had been diagnosed with autism with high support needs who had genetic testing done for completely unrelated things and it’s turned out that they have a very rare genetic disorder which can cause these symptoms.

Nail on head (for me).

It isn’t that I think people that could potentially be misdiagnosed are otherwise absolutely fine. It’s that I think the complexities of the human brain - whether that’s FAS, ACEs, or organic conditions which produce anxiety responses (such as extreme vitamin D deficiencies, thyroid conditions, anaemia etc), are ALL being chalked up to neurodiversity.

I remember one post by a worried mum whose son had suddenly become withdrawn/anxious and had a number of vague behavioural symptoms and everyone responded pushing for an ASD assessment, saying things like ‘yes it can suddenly present later on when the masking stops’ etc. She decided to take him for a blood test first, it transpired he was extremely vitamin D deficient and within a few months of supplementing, his behaviour and emotions returned to normal.

I think there’s a danger that conditions could be being overlooked in favour of putting everything down to autism/adhd, and using ‘masking’ as an explanation for later onset of symptoms.

I think there's some merit in that (although those of us who've been in "the game" a while are often dealing with a bunch of other conditions anyway with our children - my DC for example is hypermobile so we're often at the physio and/or dealing with things that look like they could be broken but are actually overstretched muscles and tendons).

There are so many barriers in the way of managing your children's health in this country! GPs aren't specialists; there seem to be so few NHS paediatricians; even if you pay it's tricky when your child's under say 12 because the kind of professions such as physiotherapists it's relatively easy to access as an adult, often don't take children.

The "H" in EHCP has always been one of the most problematic parts I think.

The H in EHCPs is almost non existent in my experience, even for children with relatively complex health needs. I've seen crap like 'has a peg' with nothing else on there or 'has an inhaler' for a child with severe asthma and frequent serious asthma attacks in the classroom. Sometimes there is nothing at all in there. Only once have I seen appropriately provisioned C&G in an EHCP and weirdly that was for a child with no life threatening or very serious health conditions. So weird.

My experience is as a teacher is that medical issues tend to be dealt with entirely separately at school, often without any input from the SEN team (fair enough if it's something time limited like a broken leg), but it is difficult to suffer e.g. poorly controlled diabetes, epilepsy, asthma or Chrohn's without impact on your education. It's a shame the holistic aspect of EHCP was lost between the healthcare and education silos.

@BertieBotts i think trying to do a precise numerical analysis of a straw poll which you don’t ascribe any meaning to anyway is pointless, at least by your standards. That said even your guess is 10 times the ‘official’ line; does this not ring bells with you, in any way? Especially considering you discounted many posts which may have meant ASD and ADHD but just used the umbrella ‘SEN’ instead? The rest of your post bemused me. Nobody has said spending more time outside will prevent ASD or ADHD, nobody has even really touched on anything like that. But again it feels like there’s an element of trying to downplay how prevalent this appears to be in schools now, probably because parents feel it undermines their child’s diagnosis. I can’t think of another reason why.

Because the "official" line for the umbrella of SEN is 20%.

And I still don't know where your "official" 1% comes from because I haven't seen a source for it anywhere. I used autism because it's the only thing I have ever seen quoted at 1% and as others have said, I believe this is outdated.

I am not trying to downplay anything, honestly. I almost feel the opposite from your posts, like you are trying to play the whole thing up for some kind of shock/horror value - I assume because you are concerned that this is a big problem and you want people to see that it is a real and concerning issue. I just think that inflating figures and presenting them in a misleading way is unhelpful.

I am actually very interested in the link between ADHD, ASD and trauma because I believe there is something interesting to be uncovered there, probably related to the functioning of the nervous system. In management of my own/my DC's ADHD I've found reading around the nervous system regulation incredibly helpful and I think more research would be good here.

I am defensive however of positions that ADHD/ASD is "often" misdiagnosed trauma because this is a narrative pushed by certain parts of the alternative health industry and IMO, it's a distraction. I don't think it overly matters what exact diagnosis somebody has if it means that they can access support which may help them. But the supports for ADHD/Autism are more comprehensive than support for trauma so I'd prefer to err on the side of overdiagnosis in that case especially as I believe historically these conditions have been underdiagnosed and likely still are. I can see that diagnoses of these conditions are rising, and like another poster, I think this is a good thing overall, and I think they will plateau.

I do think the current state of the health services is a problem because I agree that it seems they are overloaded and possibly poorly designed in terms of when you seek an assessment, if I understand correctly, children/adults are put in for assessment of a specific condition rather than some kind of general examination which might uncover more of a clear picture. I remember in the 90s/00s when I was at school, I had a lot of friends who were diagnosed/identified as having dyslexia, but now that we are all adults, a significant amount of them have found that actually, they are also ADHD/ASD but this wasn't picked up at the time, and the difficulties they have with things like sequencing, or understanding sarcasm, or organisation, which were put down to their dyslexia, could have been equally or even better explained by their other ND condition, which was missed. It's quite possible we are seeing something similar to this now, where ADHD/ASD are the first thing people jump to and if you get put through that assessment first, then that's the answer you'll get. But I don't think that questioning the diagnoses themselves is the answer to this, I think that is a risky approach which can cause harm.

The school census returns put SEN at 20%. Thats all types of SEN. Its recently updated, but there are category anomalies.

I have seen 1% of chikdren 0-17 have an official diagnosis of autism in a BMA report released in 2024. It was a report about under duagnosis and issues in securing a diagnosis suggesting it should be 1 in 57. There isnt an update to this. I have heard that more children are getting a diagnosis in certain year groups. Up to 3 or 4%. Id wager rates for under 3 are near zero.

I’m not a teacher but a parent of a child with an EHCP which has been in place since he was 5 years old. He’s in mainstream primary and hopefully will be allocated a mainstream secondary.
The borough I live is in the North west and has a very high and rising number of EHCP’s.
Per the admissions to the 20 mainstream secondary schools for 2025 there were 140 EHCP’s across a total intake of year 7 students of 4360 pupils. This amounts to 3.2% of students overall. There are differences across schools with several having 7% of pupils with an EHCP in current year 7 right through to one school with none.

Over 50% (13/23) of my last y4 class in a co-ed fee-paying school. Most definitely not a special school, but not selective either. No TA.

Before moving there I had a Y6 class in a deprived area state school with 75% on SEN register. 13 EHCPs. Most were ND but a few with DLD too.

Look, the National Autistic Society puts the figure at slightly above 1%, so something like 700,000. ADHD is 2.6 million people according to ADHD Uk, so more like 3%.

It’s plain as the nose on your face that this is not at all representative of what is happening in classrooms across the UK.

Look at the figures here - 20-30% seems to be completely and utterly normal. So ‘neurodivergence’ is basically becoming a large minority, if not the majority if the current rate of diagnosis carries on for another handful of years.

I honestly don’t get why just pointing out what is so obvious, offends people so much. You can’t diagnose everyone with autism and ADHD and then be surprised that ‘everyone’ has autism and ADHD.

As others have said, I suspect that since autism and adhd are so well known now and the diagnostic criteria have broadened, other less familiar issues with similar symptoms are being lumped into those categories. I also think those diagnoses are sometimes more comfortable explanations for children's difficulties from the perspective of parents and teachers than some of the other potential ones.

'Look at the figures here - 20-30% seems to be completely and utterly normal. So ‘neurodivergence’ is basically becoming a large minority, if not the majority if the current rate of diagnosis carries on for another handful of years.'

That's not how the data works, even though it's how the story is perceived by (some of) the public.

You can’t diagnose everyone with autism and ADHD and then be surprised that ‘everyone’ has autism and ADHD.

Except everyone is not being diagnosed with ASD and ADHD. Even using the percentages in your post, that is not ‘everyone’.

I’m sorry but I’m going to go with the NHS and the NAS not some crackpot MN thread to base my knowledge on.

My lived experiences of working in SEND and having children and other family members with both corroborates with that anyway. Both are hugely underdiagnosed in the UK. It’s tragic.

Of course it’s not everyone, hence the speech marks. But people seem to be bending themselves into pretzels to explain away what seems to be a routine 20% diagnosis rates in classrooms, and make its it’s still a small minority etc - when it clearly isn’t.

There isn’t a 20% diagnosis rate of ASD and ADHD in classrooms. 19.5% have SEN but that figure encompasses all types of SEN, including those without a formal diagnosis of anything.

The speech marks were only around the second ‘everyone’. Not the first where you said you can’t diagnose everyone with autism and ADHD.

You’re ignoring data to suit your own little hypothesis. Do you really not realise that your own little survey doesn’t speak for the country as a whole.