You can order it from bookshop.org here

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By way of a quick reminder of the literary delights inside, here’s a bit of me and my son James delighting his school talent show with The Velvets’ I’m Waiting For The Man:

James starts to make progress. His weekly highlight is the music class led by a teacher called Miss Parsons, who looks like a retired ballet dancer, and is full of warmth, but also unbelievably ordered and together. Miss Parsons always shows James songs and riffs he can play on the keyboard, and, at the end of each lesson, she also lets him select songs to play from Spotify to the whole class. He is regularly allowed to spend some of his lunch break doing as he pleases with the instruments in the music room.

Eventually, Miss Parsons tells us about her department’s annual production. It’s called Oakfield’s Got Talent, and she wonders whether James might perform? When I ask him, I get a fervent yes; to reduce the chances of anything unexpected happening, she agrees to the suggestion that I should accompany him on an acoustic guitar.

It happens just over a fortnight later. We decide to perform When the Saints Go Marching In and I’m Waiting for the Man, both of which have been extensively practised, and then played in three dress rehearsals.

We will be the first act on. The school hall is packed, and I am full of churning anxiety. James does not seem nervous at all.

An introduction – “This is James Harris, and his dad!” – and off we go. The keyboard’s swing jazz preset begins gurgling and thumping away and James plays the first notes of The Saints on its trumpet preset, whereupon the mums and dads in the audience instantly start clapping along, on the “on” beat. This throws him. He drops out of the rhythm, then drops back in, then drops out again. We may be about to implode.

But, as ever, James is great at correcting his mistakes. At the start of our second and final verse, everything coheres, and he plays the rest perfectly. A beatific smile breaks out on his face. He presses the “end” button on the keyboard, and in a final flurry of booms and crashes and one last chord, we finish. The applause this triggers is quite something: a great warm burst of encouragement and appreciation that makes me well up.

I reach for a piece of paper that is serving as a cue card, and James reads it out: “This next song was originally by the Velvet Underground, and it’s called” – he then slows down – “I’m. Waiting. For. The. Man.”

When we play it, James sounds like Mark E Smith from the Fall, barking out the words, and rising to the conclusion of each verse – “Oh, I’m waiting for mah man” – with a loud sense of triumph. A few times, he drifts away from the microphone, and yells the words into the air. We have worked out a procedure for this: I say “Microphone! Microphone!” out of the side of my mouth, and he returns to the right spot.

I don’t know if many of the audience quite understand what they are listening to: a less-than-wholesome song about copping dope in 1960s Manhattan, the grimness of withdrawal, and the rapturous pleasure of yet another hit of heroin. But they like it: we get a second round of applause, and I do that showbiz thing of camply extending my arm in James’s direction. There are a few whoops, and he picks his way down the wooden stairs to the right of us, before taking a seat in the audience.

Ginny and Rosa are there. To us, the meaning of the six minutes James and I have just spent on the stage is pretty obvious. If you are repeatedly told what your child can’t do, it starts to eat at you. Certain words hover over you: “severe”, “profound”, “impairment”. You miss superlatives; whatever successes your child achieves, they don’t tend to feel like the same ones other kids experience. But here is something James can do – brilliantly, fantastically, wonderfully – on the same terms as everyone else. Better still, he loves doing it, and it makes him the centre of attention.

It is a gorgeous summer evening, and everything feels as if it is surrounded by a lovely glow. When we get home, James does not sleep, but I do not mind at all. “I want to do that again,” he says. “I want to do that again!”

More writing soon!

The whispers, briefings and postponements went on for over a year. Anxiety and fear among families was constant, and seemed to reach a peak when the biggest leak of all was published in The Times during February half-term, quite the worst timing imaginable. But today, at 11am, there it was: the long-awaited Education White Paper, containing the “consultation document” centred on the government’s sweeping reform plans for England’s Special Educational Needs system.

It’s been a pretty head-spinning couple of days. Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, did the media rounds on Sunday, but it’s in the nature of the kind of encounters this entails that not much became clear: the questions from her hosts were mostly perfunctory and superficial, and she insisted she wasn’t going to give much away until the following day.

Monday morning brought a BP-authored piece in the Guardian that sounded almost utopian. “Our reforms will deliver a school system unrecognisable to the one we have today,” she wrote. “One where brilliant support is no longer hidden behind layer upon layer of conflict and bureaucracy, but available in classrooms, where children need it and when they need it… Children and young people with SEND will spend time in classrooms with their peers… with a specialist area down the corridor for the points in the day when a smaller group would better meet their needs.”

That was accompanied by the most straightforwardly positive bits of the government’s plan, which were instantly turned into hot-take write-ups : £1.6 billion to be spent over the next three years on ensuring that the needs of kids in mainstream schools are “identified early and met consistently”, another £1.8 billion for “speech and language therapists, educational psychologists and wider professionals” to bring their work into schools – and a reminder that a new generation of Sure Start-style family hubs will each have an in-house Send expert.

Most of us who have been following this saga well knew that the more chewy stuff was to come: at this point, there was a dawning sense of a mixed bag of measures that would have to be carefully picked through.

And now we know. So here’s one part of the story. The government well knows that the crisis in the SEND system runs deep and wide, and needs a combination of measures that stretches across the age range, and beyond the education system alone. It has a fierce belief in mainstream inclusion that is effectively the opposite of the approach taken back in the grim days of the coalition government, when David Cameron announced that he was set on reversing what he called the “bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools”, and Michael Gove was encouraging the kind of rigid, archaic educational approaches that would further push kids into specialist settings (do not forget: between 2012 and 2019, the number of children with Special Needs in English mainstream schools fell by a quarter, while the number attending special schools increased by nearly a third).

And in that sense, some - some! - of the reform plans are well-intentioned and undeniably progressive, at least in theory. Phillipson strikes me as a pretty traditional Labour education secretary, with staunchly inclusivist instincts, and an innate dislike of the kind of Gradgrindian ideas that have dominated many schools for a very long time. Her quest to improve everyday SEND support in mainstream schools - and create kinder, more open cultures – is focused on some of the key reasons for Special Needs costs skyrocketing, and kids being routinely failed. There are chunks of the plans that no right-wing government would go near: an implicit recognition, too, that modern childhood is complex and often confounding, and all that noise about “overdiagnosis” and made-up need is not helping.

But by lunchtime, as I wrote a long piece for The Guardian’s comment section that’s just gone up, glaring issues with the SEND plan were becoming clearer and clearer. Many of them chimed with the constant briefings and whispers that have run through the last twelve months, and deep fears among SEND people that basic rights were inevitably about to be diluted and hacked back. I also felt a mounting unease – which I have written about before – about the sheer scale of the transformation the government wants to attempt, and the relative paucity of the funding it is putting behind it.

So, here goes. In today’s piece, there’s this point about the mainstream inclusion drive:

Even if it is superficially the right thing to do, the shift from specialist to mainstream schooling looks like a high-stakes experiment. Teachers in mainstream schools worry about hugely increased workloads, the paucity of funds set aside for new staff training, and the fact that the aforementioned £1.6 billion breaks down to nothing much at all (as the website Special Needs Jungle swiftly pointed out, it falls short of even allowing each setting to recruit a single new teaching assistant). I have met plenty of parents and professionals who point out that standard-issue mainstream class sizes and the sheer sensory overload of most schools will place limits on the kind of transformation the government has in mind: Phillipson’s bald insistence that “children do better in mainstream schools” may be true in academic terms, but it overlooks the tangle of very human issues that sometimes means that a specialist school is a family’s best option - a realisation that can hit home at any point during a child’s time at school.

These points are partly reflective of my own experience as a parent. Bigging up an open, kind, inclusive vision of mainstream education inevitably plays well with many SEND parents. As a matter of basic belief, I believe in that kind of view myself. But my son James left mainstream provision for a specialist autism school - when he was 14 - for a reason, and I discovered things that the somewhat crap, knee-jerk, stigmatised idea of special schools tends to leave out. The small class sizes suited him. His new school was autism-friendly right down to its architecture (no sharp edges or sudden corners, and lots of curves). It was good that we were suddenly dealing with people steeped in autism education, and what it entails.

In that sense, there is something in the government’s rhetoric that doesn’t sit quite right. When she made her big speech today in Peterborough, Phillipson held out an alluring prospect. “More children educated at a great local mainstream school… with their friends, close to their family, part of their local community,” she said. “That’s what’s best for them. My department has published new evidence on English and maths GCSE results…looking at similar children with SEND…and the message is clear: They do better in mainstream schools.” Academically, perhaps, but I suspect the government is about to discover that in some cases at least, the real world is a bit more complicated than that, not least if you aim at a revolution without the requisite budget.

The main issue, however, goes straight to what some of us have feared all along. Again, from my piece today:

Education, Health and Care Plans, those legally-backed summaries of children’s needs and provision… are to eventually be cut back, while also being drastically re-invented…Between now and 2030, the government says, the volume of EHCPs will continue to increase – but by 2035, reviews of individual families’ cases that will begin in September 2029 will seemingly have done their work. Assuming that pupil numbers remain stable, a new Send system that will reserve such provision for children with “the most complex needs” will have pushed the number down by 270,000. Moreover, rather than being rooted in individual children’s needs, a new kind of EHCP will seemingly be based on seven pre-ordained “Specialist support packages”, covering such clunky and old-fashioned sounding categories as “profound and multiple learning difficulties” and “sensory impairment” . For most kids, the option favoured by schools and councils will be so-called Individual Support Plans [or ISPs], whose legal footing and openness to parents’ input will not be nearly as strong: with an almost Orwellian chutzpah, this is the basis on which the government claims it is overseeing a “radical expansion of rights”.

This, obviously, is very big stuff. It embodies a rebalancing of the SEND system away from the personalised, child-centred model that EHCPs embody towards something much more top-down and generic. And worse still, such a huge scything-down of EHCPs threatens to leave plenty of families stranded, in a system that – even if most of the plans work -will take a very long time to turn around. If you had an EHCP and are then transferred to an ISP, some of your means of redress and accountability may well turn out to be impossibly difficult: ministers have been saying that parents with problems would start with a school’s complaints process – but that threatens to bring adversarial disputes into the kind of relationships that have to work on an everyday level. Such is one key virtue of EHCPs and the SEND tribunal: grievances, by definition, are dealt with by councils, which leaves parents’ relationship with their child’s school intact and untouched. I wonder whether anyone at the DfE has really thought about that.

There is also a huge issue about the most drastic changes’ timing. Families with existing ECHPs will begin transferring to the new system in September 2029. That, says the government, gives the changes time to bed in. It also means that a watershed loss of rights may well happen just when Reform UK start running the country, and England’s education system. And therein lies a chilling thought:

The selling of Philipson’s plan is implicitly based on the idea that people with her kind, optimistic instincts will always be in charge of it. But what happens if power passes to a party whose senior figures not only endorse the “overdiagnosis” myth, but have lately been heard suggesting that Send children might be educated in empty churches?

Now the plans have been announced, a three-month consultation period begins. As they are picked apart and discussed, the fact that the proposals mix welcome plans with dire prospects will surely become ever-clearer. This is already a fragile government, with a long record of U-turns. The noise, I suspect, is going to get very loud indeed.

• You can order my memoir Maybe I’m Amazed – about my autistic son James, how we fought through the SEND system, and why music is our most precious source of connection – here

• More on the Save Our Children’s Rights campaign here

In the wake of all the writing I’ve been doing here about the imminent arrival of the government’s long-awaited Special Needs reform plans, I’ve written a big article for The Guardian that’s just gone up – about where everything seems to be up to, and why much of what we’ve heard so far causes me and so many other parents and carers so much worry and unease.

There are strong rumours that the Education White Paper that will include everything is to be published the week commencing February 23rd. That’s very interesting timing: the high-stakes Gorton and Denton byelection is that week, which may spark renewed unrest and chaos in the Labour Party, possibly including another crisis for Keir Starmer. There again, whispers about the reform plans are getting louder by the day and the Department for Education’s social media accounts have gone into overdrive, so it’s safe to presume that we’re very, very close to publication.

The piece I wrote is here. By way of a few edited highlights, one of the key things it points out is the discrepancy between the scale of the government’s ambitions (it’s fair to say that they want us to think of what they’re doing as a SEND revolution, and in many respects, it probably is) and the meagre resources that will be spent on some of its key elements. Fair play to them: even if it’s spread over 10 years, the £3.7 billion of capital spending going on new “inclusion bases” in secondary schools seems to fit all the talk of sweeping change. But what about what actually happens inside all that apparently brand-new – and repaired – bricks and mortar?

Ministers promise “the most ambitious and comprehensive SEND training offer ever seen by the English schools system”, which will apparently ensure that “every teacher receives training to support pupils”. But as I say in my piece:

How much has been found for this great leap forward? Here we encounter a gap between lofty ambition and the likely reality that is one of this government’s specialities. The answer? Just £200m – which must cover not just England’s almost 470,000 teachers, but support staff, people who work in further education colleges, early-years workers and more. Even on the most generous estimates, that works out at no more than a couple of hundred pounds per head.

I also point out a glaring omission from all the pre-white paper government PR and the constant reporting of all its whispers and briefings. Education, Health and Care Plans can go up to the age of 25: as the government’s own blurb says, they can cover further education, training, supported internships and apprenticeships – as well as “volunteering or community participation”, physiotherapy and a range of stuff covering life skills.

Over the last year, what a new SEND system will mean for all this has been left almost completely untouched, and the way that the reforms have so far been presented – as being all about schools – has only intensified the jangling of nerves. For a lot of us, this is personal: my son James is 19, has an EHCP, and goes to a brilliant FE college. Some of the people involved in the current SEND conversation need to be reminded of experiences like his, and the fact that post-16 and 18 provision is just as important as any other kind.

While I’m here, I also want to say something more about one of the most terrifying possible moves that has been mentioned in the blizzard of leaks and briefings that has gained pace over the last few weeks. On January 27th, the ‘i’ newspaper’ reported that the government is considering narrowing the legal scope for appeals to the national SEND tribunal, “potentially by removing parents’ right to challenge a decision [by a council] not to assess a child’s needs.” This idea has been kicking around for a while: last year, the Local Government Association – which represents England and Wales’s local authorities – said it wanted “short to medium term” removal of a refusal to assess a child for an EHCP from the Tribunal’s reach.

It should be screamed from the rooftops: this would be a cruel and shameful move: a classic bureaucratic fix which would slam the door on families before they had even entered the EHCP system, and - if it happened - represent by far the most grimly symbolic change to the SEND machine. At the last count, a third of the tribunal cases that councils lost in a full hearing were on exactly this issue, and if you encounter a group of SEND parents, you always hear the horror stories that reflect that.

Ours was both nightmarish and absurd: James had been diagnosed with autism, and all the relevant reports and documents said that his kind was intense enough to require dedicated support, but we well knew we’d be turned down. So it proved. And as my book says:

“By way of fleshing out their case, [the council] send us three envelopes, stuffed with photocopied bumf and suggestive of an epic bureaucratic brain-fart. The resulting pile is huge - five inches thick, at least – and full of information that seems completely irrelevant: leaflets about James’s nursery, a couple of questionnaires about autism, and a seemingly random stack of absurd advice. ‘At your new school there are likely to be pupils from other schools in your class… it may help to act out meeting new people and use some of their suggestions. Smile when you say hello…’ I have no idea what we are meant to do with all this. Is the sheer volume meant to scare us off?”

Anyway, we appealed, and the council finally agreed to assess James. That experience is seared into my memory: obviously, the prospect of councils soon being able to behave like this with complete impunity is both petrifying and morally offensive.

To finish, a word about one other aspect of the advance noise about the white paper. Both the ‘i’ and Financial Times have suggested that new restrictions to EHCPs might be delayed, until around 2030. This, it seems, is intended to allow time for other parts of the reforms to bed in – but obviously, it will also form a big aspect of how the changes are sold to MPs: as a gradual, careful package. But the fact remains: the hacking-down of EHCPs and legal rights still seems to be the intended destination, as the ‘i’ makes clear:

It is understood that existing support via EHCPs – which are legal documents that describe children’s additional needs and unlock extra funding – will be fully protected before 2030. The Government is set to use this time period to ensure additional needs can be met in mainstream schools and support families through the transition period. But between 2030 and 2035, children will be expected to transition to the reformed SEND system, where EHCPs may be harder to retain and reserved for pupils with the greatest needs under new legislation… No child will be asked to leave their school, and they will only be expected to move to the new system when they reach a key transition phase, such as moving from primary to secondary school at the age of 11, or leaving school at 16, it is understood.

So, these changes still look as drastic and worrying as they ever did. And the prospect of them kicking in circa 2030 raises another big question.

Labour is highly likely to not be in power by then. Nigel Farage and Reform UK may well be. We all know what they tend to think about questions of neurodivergence, and the nuances of Special Needs education: one of their most recent suggestions was that SEND kids might be educated in empty churches. Which returns us to a question I’ve asked before: are Labour ministers aware that one of the most grave consequences of what they’re proposing might be the tearing-away of rights and protections just when Reform UK are going to be eyeing their own “reforms”? And if they are… well, you know: what do they think they’re doing?

• You can order Maybe I’m Amazed, my memoir about my autistic son James, how we fought our way through the SEND system, and why music connects us, here.

• More about the Save Our Children’s Rights campaign here.

Everyone knows it: this has been the worst week for Keir Starmer’s government since it took office 19 long months ago, and its tailspinning chaos and panic are not going to die down. The first tranche of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US may be published next week. The Gorton and Denton byelection will arrive on February 26th – and if Labour lose, whatever the tensions and complexities of Andy Burnham’s side of the story, Starmer and his allies’ decision to bar him from standing will be blamed.

The Labour Party is not like the Tories, who have got used to toppling their leaders with blithe abandon: it is a lumbering, self-doubting institution, often paralysed – particularly when it’s in government – by a kind of imposter syndrome. Overnight, there were stories about how an ideal moment for Labour MPs to move against Starmer had come on Wednesday, but then receded, amid worry and confusion. For the moment, some of them might settle for the forced departure of Starmer’s increasingly infamous Chief Of Staff Morgan McSweeney, although his exit would surely drastically weaken the PM, and accelerate Starmer’s own demise. Whatever, there is an overwhelming feeling that the end will be reached - soon, eventually, at some unspecified point in the immediate future - one way or another, and a vivid sense of Starmer as such an impossibly compromised, diminished figure that Harrioet Harman’s claim that he seems “weak, naive and gullible” looks rather generous.

That’s the standard political journalism bit. Meanwhile, ministers, advisers and civil servants are still clocking on each day at the Department for Education and, as far as anyone knows, doing final work on the looming education white paper, which will contain the government’s plans for SEND reform. And as the government lurches on, the discordant, troubling mood music preparing us for its publication goes on.

This week, the Local Government Association – which represents England’s councils – published claims that four out of five local authorities will be bankrupted by Special Needs spending unless the government hacks back costs by changing the system (a story that, once again, rather undermines insistences from the DfE that its reforms are about improving outcomes rather than saving money). In Schools Week, there were also reports about officials from the DfE and NHS instructing councils to start work on “local SEND reform plans” that go with the grain of the government’s changes, even before those changes have been passed: “We must… begin this essential work now and your leadership and partnership is critical to this,” said the relevant government letter.

The most punchy news story, however, was about stark warnings from the Disabled Children’s Partnership, which represents over 130 charities and professional organisations (including Mencap, the National Autistic Society and the Council for Disabled Children), contained in a letter to Bridget Phillipson. To quote from the report in The Guardian, it warned against any SEND changes that would “strip away legally enforceable plans [i.e EHCPs] for children who need them”, or get rid of the SEND tribunal, “disrupt current support or placements, or narrow the definition of SEND in a way that restricts eligibility.”

There were other red lines, focused on “any abrupt cut in support from the age of 18” (something none of the recent splurge of SEND news stories have covered), and an insistence on “greater training and support for mainstream schools”. What all this means seems obvious: people and organisations who must have a pretty clear sense of what is coming are feeling extremely anxious, because of what the kind of scything-down of rights and accountability suggested in other recent reports would mean for hundreds of thousands of kids and their families. This point was put most pithily by Katie Ghose, the Chief Executive of the disability charity Kids:

“Parents are… worried about not having a big red button to press when their child isn’t supported in the way they need. Parents will be worried about both plans and accountability until they can see those guarantees are locked down in law.”

Which brings us back to politics. As everything nosedives, ministers are having to split their attention between their departmental briefs, and a Labour crisis that will probably soon result in a convulsive moment when the Prime Minister will be confronted with the direness of his position, and his fate will become clear. Who do they want to be the next leader? How do they navigate the next few uncertain weeks? If a change at the top is coming, which ministers will continue in their posts, and which plans and policies will survive? On any rational reading of how bad things are, if questions like those are swirling around, the last thing the government needs is a battle with some of the most tenacious parents, carers, charities and campaigners, over basic rights.

If you want a clear sense of how the SEND reform plans might worsen the government’s crisis, there was a potent flavour of it in a recent column by Ian Birrell, the staunch disability campaigner who writes for the ‘i’. He focused on recent, apparently well-briefed stories about the possibility of removing parents’ rights to appeal against a council that refuses to assess their child for an EHCP, and also confining other appeals to whether the correct processes were followed, rather than the content of a council’s decisions – awful, miserable suggestions that are already spreading fear among SEND families. Birrell said this:

Think about this: a Labour Government headed by a human rights lawyer wants to protect councils that fail to meet their legal responsibilities to some of the nation’s most vulnerable young people. It wants to do so by ending the statutory right of parents to challenge wrongful decisions made by faceless officials. Is this really what all those Labour MPs think they were elected to do?

In the midst of Labour’s current meltdown, those moves would surely look like the stuff of political insanity. But in the context of Starmer’s unfolding leadership disaster, there might be another reading of how some of the most drastic SEND proposals would fit into the current chaotic picture. Bridget Phillipson, in my understanding, is one of those ministers who prides themselves on being forthright, organised and determined: she may want to be seen to be keeping her head when all around her are losing theirs, not least because the possible end of Starmer’s leadership will lead to a huge jostling for position among senior Labour politicians. And in a moment like this, that might – might – persuade her and her allies to present a picture of steely resolve, and push on … even to relish a fight over rights, as a means of showing they will not be swayed.

That, of course, would be both cruel, and toxic. It would spark a battle that even the most capable politician would stand little chance of winning, pitting Westminster and Whitehall against people and organisations synonymous with sympathy and support from the public and the moral high ground. But that does not mean it won’t happen: as we are seeing on an hourly basis, the world of politics and power is often strange and irrational, and even if a decision is ill-advised beyond words, that doesn’t mean it won’t be taken. Far beyond the fate of Keir Starmer, this is going to be one of the most consequential few months British politics has recently witnessed – and for everyone involved in SEND, the stakes are now dizzyingly high.

• You can order Maybe I’m Amazed, my memoir about my autistic son James, how we fought our way through the SEND system, and why music connects us, here.

As the grinding drama about big changes to England’s Special Needs system continues, most of the cast of actors is nothing if not familiar: education ministers and their advisers, councils, campaigners, assorted online influencers, teachers, one or two celebrities – and parents and carers who are probably too busy to get actively involved, but are anxiously watching as everything unfolds.

One of the key players, however, is too often overlooked. For least a year now, we have been hearing no end of insider information – or what looks like it – from “sources”.

Sometimes, there will apparently only be one. Occasionally, there seem to be two or three. They may be “Westminster sources”, “Whitehall sources”, “government sources” or just “sources” unspecified. But there they are, most weeks: many varieties of source, enthusiastically telling journalists about what might be planned for SEND children and young people – which, in the absence of confirmed detail from those at the top, has often been all the information we’ve had to go on… even if some of it has been contradictory and woefully unclear.

The result is a depressing ritual that is now part of thousands of lives. Yet another article appears and gets passed around on the usual social media platforms. It sparks worry and fear, in the midst of lives that are already far too full of those things. Even if whatever is written seems well-briefed and credible - and echoes most of what we’ve heard so far about the looming reforms – the Education Department will usually distance itself from everything, using such language as “these claims are speculative and do not represent government policy proposals”.

So you know, but you don’t know. In response, some people contact whoever they can, chasing confirmations, denials or practical advice, all of which are simply impossible. I have a friend who works for an autism charity who says that every such news story causes a spike in panicked calls to its helpline, whose answerers can’t go much beyond assurances that any changes will take a while to arrive. Meanwhile, the wait for the legislative white paper that actually will set everything out goes on: as a recipe for nervous wall-crawling, it’s all horribly perfect.

Last week saw a small handful of perfect examples of how this works (or doesn’t). In late December, the Times ran a big story that seemed to serve notice of likely changes to the reach of Education, Health and Care Plans (or EHCPs) and the rights they enshrine. “Parents whose children have moderate mental health and developmental needs are set to be stripped of their legal right to certain supports under plans being considered by ministers,” it said, quoting “Whitehall sources” to flesh out its claims. But on Thursday January 22nd, things seemed to take a new turn.

“No 10 may dilute plans to overhaul the special educational needs system over fears that a backbench rebellion would lead to another government reversal,” said another front-page story. Mindful of the possibility of a backbench rebellion, a single “source” said the prime minister’s officials were “leaning towards tinkering around the edges of the existing system to avoid upset”, a move the article implied might avoid the most drastic moves on EHCPs. The same person, moreover, had stern words for the Education Department: “It’s still a bloody mess, a couple of weeks before the white paper…. It’s going to be extremely challenging.”

Here, it seemed, was more proof of the chaos and dysfunction at the top that has led to all those U-turns. And then, the next day, another set of “sources” (including “a source close to the reforms”, “ a senior MP”, “a government source” and “an insider” ) provided the ‘i’ with a rather different story: of bold plans for a wholly new system largely based around four “tiers” of need and support, with EHCPs reserved for kids in a fifth category, many of whom would have to “move through the tiers until their needs are met.” The meaning was pretty clear: on this evidence, there will be no “tinkering around the edges” , something also highlighted by claims that the SEND funding system is to be rebuilt “from scratch”, which entails – among other things – schools commissioning “NHS psychologists” and speech and language therapists to work with “groups of children”.

The entirely predictable result? More anxiety and fear, not least about how children might “move through the tiers”. That sounds like it might be a version of a cruel system already used informally by some councils, whereby proper needs assessment and provision only arrive once a child has demonstrably failed, or fallen out of meaningful education altogether. The crucial point was put most pithily by Special Needs Jungle: “If the leaks are true, it seems children with SEND are about to embark on a Government-sponsored version of the Hunger Games, where they are forced to compete for scarce resources and only the fittest survive to claim the ultimate prize: an education that meets their needs.” That’s a lot to have to worry about, but the DfE would not be drawn one way or the other: “We do not comment on speculation,” said a spokesperson quoted in the ‘i’, and that was pretty much that.

In fifteen-plus years of political journalism, I don’t think I have seen anything quite like this: a mad game of briefing, counter-briefing and official stonewalling that has been going on for a very long time, as a few more examples prove. As long ago as December 2024, the Financial Times ran a piece headlined “Keir Starmer looks at sweeping reforms to special education needs”, in which a “senior official” held out the prospect of ending legal entitlements for children supposedly at the “lighter” end of ADHD and autism, and allowing “thousands fewer pupils” to get EHCPs.

Five months later, the Times echoed much the same story, citing “a government source” who said EHCPs would be soon be reserved for kids with “very high and complex needs”, a phrase we’ve been hearing a lot, with maddeningly little insight into what it actually means. “Any changes we make will improve support for children and parents, stop parents from having to fight for support, and protect provision currently in place,” said the DfE, but even at this point, the sheer repetition of the same plans - for hacked-down legal entitlements, and rights confined to a much smaller number of kids – had a very worrying ring. At around the same time, the senior SEND adviser Christine Lenehan, who is at the core of the reform plans, confirmed that there were good reasons to fear the worst: when asked if there were plans to restrict EHCPs to kids in special schools and thereby remove them from mainstream education (which would bring huge numbers families massive anxiety), she said: “I think, to be honest, that’s the conversation we’re in the middle of.”

I’d wager that the government’s plans and proposals are now pretty clear. Some rumours suggest that the White Paper might arrive as early as February 9th, while other reports claim that everything will become clear in “mid-March” – but when it finally materialises, the government may well be faced with suggestions that it has serially refused to acknowledge what it’s been planning all along.

Some specific details, I’m told, could be the subject of further leaks and briefings later this week. But in another twist, the FT has just reported that “the most difficult changes to special educational needs and disabilities provision” – on rights and EHCPs - might be delayed “until the start of the 2029-30 academic year, risking the reforms becoming embroiled in the campaign for a general election”. Why? “Taking longer to implement the changes is seen as one way to avoid a repeat of the backbench rebellion that killed off last year’s attempt to restrict disability benefits, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.” That’ll be more “sources”, then.

To finish, back to the ‘i’. On Tuesday night, it ran a piece developing something that had cropped up in the FT: suggestions that the government might be about to dramatically limit families’ right to appeal to the official SEND tribunal. At the last count, let’s not forget, 99% of cases that went to a full hearing were found against councils, and in favour of parents. The possible answer? “The government is understood to be considering narrowing the legal scope for appeals, potentially by removing parents' right to challenge a decision not to assess a child’s needs,” said the piece: a monstrously cruel move which would kick away a precious means not just of accountability, but getting thousands of children roughly the right support. And there was more: appeals might be limited to “whether the correct process was followed”, rather than the content of council decisions.

What an injustice that would be: the consistent failure of many local authorities to meet their legal responsibilities being answered by simply putting their decisions beyond people’s reach. A “source close to the reforms” said the SEND changes could “cut the tribunal off at the knees”, which was nice. There was a quote from a “senior government source” about the entirety of the plans: “Reform is hard (hard for who, exactly?). “We know that. But this is something that needs to be done.” As I read all this, my mind raced: Was the government actually going to try something this appalling? Was it maybe a decoy, designed to frame what was really planned in a more sympathetic light? Who knew? But there was still a nagging thought: most of the other briefings ring true, so why not this one?

And so the worries pile up. As far as I can tell, none of the media stories so far have shone any light on what the government has planned for SEND families whose young people are at the upper end of the age range: EHCPs go up to 25, but precious few of the briefers or briefees have displayed made any reference to that basic fact. Much the same applies to how EHCPs cover care and health provision. So far, in fact, these are informational black holes: put them together with all the rumours, whispers and briefings, and you can see why so many people are exasperated not just with what seems to be coming, but how the whole process has been managed.

Any SEND parent knows what life is often like. You spend a lot of time waiting. Phone calls go unreturned. Official-looking envelopes containing ambiguous news arrive on Friday, meaning you can’t even begin to find out what they might mean until the following week. As a means of self-protection, you learn to prepare for the worst, and insulate yourself against that lamentable human habit of telling people everything is going to be alright, when it plainly isn’t.

It’s a pretty damning indictment of the current government that the painfully long story of its SEND reforms has so far pushed all those buttons, and left so many of us nervous and disorientated. That’s an awful way to do policy and politics, not least when the people so closely watching everything are so familiar with a mixture of silence, and cold fear. Perhaps a few of those “sources” ought to be a bit more aware of that.

• You can order Maybe I’m Amazed – my memoir about my son James, battling through the SEND system, and how music became our most precious source of connection - here.

• More info about the Save Our Children’s Rights campaign is here.

Music!

Just before Christmas, I bought Touch, the latest album by Chicago-based instrumental funsters Tortoise, which was a reminder of the excellence and fascination of the same city’s International Anthem label. You can get a good sense of these qualities – and the 21st century jazz they specialise in - on the compilation album Gilles Peterson Presents International Anthem (it’s on Spotify). From there, I’d so far recommend anything by Tortoise’s guitar fella Jeff Parker (but especially Suite For Max Brown), the self-titled debut album by Resavoir (full of horns, and sunshiney optimism) , and Kaleidoscopic Visions by London’s Tom Skinner, the drummer with Radiohead offshoot The Smile. There’s a whole world here: the listening isn’t always easy, but the best IA stuff can leave you stunned.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about the likely impact of big changes to England’s Special Educational Needs system on children and young people and their families. But there’s a whole tangle of issues woven into the same conversation about teachers and support staff, and how – in schools, colleges and early-years settings – they are going to be at the heart of what the government has planned: a huge shift away from specialist schools towards mainstream, which blurs into an increase in what will be expected of hundreds of thousands of people who work in education.

The much-delayed education White Paper will be appearing very soon (February 9th is the latest rumour), but a year of whispers, briefings and public pronouncements has already provided a strong sense of what to expect on this score.

The Education Secretary’s big idea is a new drive for mainstream inclusion, so that for the maximum number of SEND kids, “their local school is also the right school”. Her department has already announced £3 billion of funding for the buildings and facilities that will reportedly make this vision real. To quote from the official blurb, that money is being spent on “specialist, calm learning spaces in mainstream schools” – sometimes known as “units” – that mean they “won’t have to travel miles from home to have their needs met, and can instead get support in tailor-made spaces with the right facilities.”

If you want an instant flavour of the shift in policy this entails, try this. As well as calling off the building of a number of mainstream free schools, what will partly fund this is the cancellation of more specialist settings: only 15 out of 92 planned special and alternative provision (AP) free schools are now definitely going ahead, and local councils will choose whether to proceed with another 59 specialist projects, or get per-pupil money to create places in existing schools. As well as being an expression of a renewed belief in inclusion, this is part of the government’s answer to all that noise about the rising cost of Special Needs transport, an issue that is mentioned explicitly in the material announcing the new spending.

So much, then, for buildings: what about what will actually happen in them?

One big theme of all the rumblings and briefings so far has been the prospect of teachers and TAs experiencing a huge increase in their SEND responsibilities. According to one seemingly well-sourced piece in the Times, the reduction of Education, Health and Care Plans and the rights they embody may mean that schools rather than parents negotiate with councils for SEND funding, seemingly on the basis that provision will be delivered collectively (in those “units”) rather than individually.

At the same time, whereas the content of EHCPs – in theory, at least – is usually built around needs that are identified and specified by Educational Psychiatrists, Speech and Language Therapists and other professionals, there will be a new emphasis on SEND kids being identified, and their provision being drawn up, by the people who work in schools. This pretty clear paragraph, for example, is from an article in the ‘i’ paper that ran on December 29th:

Teachers and school staff will be expected to take a far greater role in identifying children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) under reforms to the system expected in the coming year. Specialist SEND units will be set up in mainstream schools in a bid to ease the reliance on legal documents acquired by parents that set out care plans for children... The move will mean more onus placed on teaching staff to both spot and meet the needs of children with SEND.

At which point, another sharp intake of breath. As any SEND parent will know, even though they often deliver inspirational schooling to kids with Special Needs, most staff in mainstream primary and secondary schools are also rushed off their feet, and burdened with big workloads. In the midst of everyday pressures and crises, SEND expertise is sometimes simply beyond their reach. The SENCos (or Special Needs Co-ordinators) who oversee and organise provision are particularly overstretched: according to work done by the National Education Union, in mainstream secondaries and primaries, the share of SENCos who say they have “difficulties with workload most or all of the time” , is 74% and 66% respectively. The result seems to be ever-increasing churn: according recent research commissioned by Schools Week, the number of teaching vacancies mentioning “SENCo” or related terms “soared” from 37,737 in 2018-19 to 76,633 in 2023-24.

We then hit another problem: the measly pay rates of support staff, and a constant crisis of recruitment and retention. This is another aspect of the tangled, troubled context for the huge change the government seems to be planning: if it’s going to be successful, the kind of of sudden skyrocketing of responsibility – and rise in the sheer number of SEND pupils in mainstream – that it seems to entail would demand something close to a revolution in the English schools system. As far as anyone can tell, what the government has planned would mean many more teachers – with vastly upgraded expertise – not just spotting kids’ needs, but deciding on the requisite support methodologies, reaching out to freelance therapists and liaising with councils and central government, while even more of them saw to the everyday teaching of a lot more SEND kids. Clearly, that would take a huge effort, and an equally huge amount of money.

But that is not what is on its way. To zoom out for a minute, great transformations in public-service provision have long seemed to be something that modern governments simply can’t even conceive of, let alone deliver. With good reason, the creation of everything from the NHS to mass social housing looks like something from another age. At a time, moreover, when the economy is stagnating and the government constantly claims to be in an impossible spending position, that impression is even stronger. What you end up with, therefore, is a recurrent gap between talk of big change and what might actually materialise, and the sense that the space between the two is full of dangers.

This much we know. Last week, the government announced a new “landmark SEND teacher training programme” costed at £200m. It will include not just teachers, but college staff, teaching assistants, and people who work in early years settings – and be “delivered flexibly to slot into teachers’ busy schedules”, with both online sessions and in-person coaching. If the money were dedicated to schoolteachers alone, it would work out at £400 per head: stretched this thin, it will amount to much less. It was, however, approvingly greeted by the TV chef and education campaigner Jamie Oliver, who said it was “a proper good start”, and “an amazing moment to all my fellow and fabulous SEND campaigners”, and this guy, for whom words are not nearly enough.

“I’ve got 30 children. Three with EHCPs. One of me.”

The reaction of some teachers has been slightly more sceptical. Rachel Hopkins is the Labour MP for Luton South and South Bedfordshire. A few days ago, she put details of the new training programme on Facebook. Over 1000 comments soon followed, including many posted by teachers. This one is a good example:

Can I have the money for a TA, or are we still pretending magic training will replace actual bodies in the classroom? I’ve got 30 children. Three with EHCPs. One of me. Tell me which “training session” teaches me how to clone myself so I can simultaneously support a child in crisis, keep 29 others learning, and meet the legal requirements of those care plans. I’d pay good money to watch a Labour MP spend a week in my classroom meeting every child’s needs with no additional support. Just one week. Let’s see how that “training” holds up.

So is this:

We have some class sizes of 34. All the training in the world cannot make one individual able to respond to so many different needs in a 55 minute lesson. We need smaller class sizes and more TA support.

Now, on paper at least, there may be an argument for being open to these changes, while remaining cautious. The number of challenges facing the SEND system - and, indeed, education itself - is huge, and change has to start somewhere. Given that properly-funded and rapid transformation will probably not be on offer, perhaps this kind of modest step is the best we can hope for, and should be welcomed in that spirit. It will take a very long time for Special Needs provision to even begin to be put right; for now, as long as it points in roughly the right direction, maybe incremental progress ought to be applauded.

Here, though, is the problem. When it comes to Special Needs, the government does not seem to be in an incremental kind of mood. There is a strong likelihood that other changes to the system will be drastic and quick, with far-reaching consequences. Certainly, the prospect of the rights embodied by EHCPs being removed from kids in mainstream schools - something ministers still refuse to rule out – would be huge. And so you end up with a grimly familiar sense of imbalance: big change when it comes to taking things away, with only comparatively trifling upsides.

If that sounds abstract, it may actually describe things that could soon be very real: a poorly-funded and ill-conceived switch from specialist to mainstream that could leave children and young people with further-degraded support, and no meaningful way for their families to hold anyone to account.

That’s why so many parents are already up in arms. You can also see it in the increasingly angry and fearful mood of people who work in the education system. When the plans for change finally materialise, therefore, it is going to be very interesting to see what the teachers’ unions say: their response, in fact, may very well decide whether many of the SEND changes fly, or sink.

• You can order my memoir Maybe I’m Amazed – about my autistic son James, how we fought through the SEND system, and why music is our most precious source of connection – here

• More on the Save Our Children’s Rights campaign here

One former politician in particular haunts what I write about Special Educational Needs.

George Osborne - “We’re all this together”, remember? - left front-line politics a decade ago, and hasn’t returned. He’s currently the Chair of the British Museum, and having seemingly made a large post-Westminster wad at a couple of finance firms, has a lucrative new job at the tech giant Open AI. But in terms of his legacy, he remains a strangely overlooked figure, despite his significance: he is, after all, the man who oversaw the endless social and economic tragedies of austerity, and thereby played a huge role in the pinched, dysfunctional country we now live in – a place full of simmering resentment, loathing of the political class, and the constant sense that too many things are dysfunctional and broken.

As I’ve said before, the crisis in provision for children and young people with SEND presents vivid proof of something that became clear after Osborne had left the Treasury: the fact that cuts – in this case, to councils, children’s centres, real-terms school spending, and so much more – usually turn out to be very expensive. So, when I heard that he was about to talk to Bridget Phillipson on the Political Currency podcast (he hosts it alongside Ed Balls), I felt compelled to listen.

The two-person chat Osborne and Phillipson had is here. By and large, the conversation is tepid and uneventful. He adopts the polite, analytical, seen-it-all tone of the former politician; she apparently doesn’t see the point of much partisan combat. They respectfully – and somewhat awkwardly – disagree about the two-child benefit limit and what happened to Sure Start, and that’s pretty much that. But their brief exchange about the SEND system is different. Even if it sounds rather anodyne, it gets into something we should all be thinking about: the politics of “overdiagnosis”, and how the inevitable noise and controversy that will be sparked by Phillipson’s plans for drastic change to the Special Needs system are going to play out, any time now.

Constant opportunities for the politics of divide and rule

While he was Chancellor, as well as spending cuts, Osborne had a particularly grim political specialism: a habit of cynically pitting one part of the public against another, usually on the basis that people on so-called “welfare” were a very handy focus of suspicion and cynicism among voters who weren’t.

Here lay constant opportunities for the politics of divide-and-rule, enthusiastically endorsed by the red-top press. You may, for example, remember the infamous passage in the speech Osborne gave to Conservative conference in 2012, replete with the fingers-down-a-blackboard sound of someone from a very privileged background holding forth about life at the sharp end: “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?”

The shorthand for this stuff was “strivers vs. skivers”. Now, Osborne thinks that current levels of benefits spending – and the end of the two-child limit on child benefit - are reviving something similar. At one point, he mentions the Motability aspect of disability benefits, and “the person in the street who’s got a brand new car” being resented by their neighbours. What’s striking, though, is how he quickly applies the same kind of thinking to SEND provision and how much money is spent on it, as follows…

“We’re better at diagnosing children’s mental health problems,” he tells Phillipson: he’s seemingly referring to autism, ADHD etc. And he goes on:

“Parents who previously just sort of took what they were told are now more assertive about what they want for their children. Who doesn’t want additional help in the classroom for their child? You know, school transport can be a nightmare, particularly for people who have mental health problems – so minicabs are provided. But if you take a step outside all this, it’s gone a little bit crazy with all of this additional spending. It’s sort of uncapped. And… I think other parents at a school will say, ‘Well has my child not got the one-to-one tuition? Why am I having to somehow get my child to school when the minicab is turning up with this other [child]?’”

There is an reasy answer to this: most of them actually won’t, because they understand that some kids have Special Needs and others don’t. But this point soon leads him on to an issue he really wants to talk about: alleged overdiagnosis, and how he thinks it might cause hostility and bad feeling about people seen as getting their kids unfair advantages. “Wes Streeting actually said publicly [that] there may be overdiagnosing,” he says. “I think he was talking more broadly about mental health issues, [but] there are obviously clear incentives… This is not to blame the parent: they want the best for their child, to try and get their child with a statement [i.e an EHCP], right?

Phillipson evidently understands what he’s driving at. “The trouble is that because of the way in which the system has been set up,” she says, “the money goes to schools in that way rather than directly to schools to accommodate a wider range of need.”

This is a really significant thing to say, which says a lot about the thinking behind the imminent white paper. The Education Secretary seems to think that via Education, Health and Care Plans, too much money is dedicatedly spent on individual children (“Special needs - the clue’s in the name,” as my partner always says), and needs to be redirected into general SEND budgets. This is the philosophy behind the creation of “specialist facilities” in mainstream schools that will seemingly cater to lots of kids at once: it obviously satisfies a crude kind of collectivism, but what it could mean in practice – children with wildly different needs, perhaps, crammed into clunky, multi-age provision – is a mounting source of concern to many parents and professionals.

There is, however, one crumb of comfort in the Osborne/Phillipson chat. Last October, she responded to a Reform UK council leader’s endorsement of Nigel Farage’s views about supposedly “massive” overdiagnosis of “general behavioural disabilities”, by labelling what he said “reckless”, “frankly shameful”, “damaging” and “shocking”. Her response to Osborne venturing a polite version of the same point is more measured: “I think the question about ‘Are we overdiagnosing?’ risks slightly missing the point,” she says. “Which is, if a teacher or member of school staff is picking up that a child needs support, whether that is a diagnosable condition or otherwise, we need to be better at meeting needs earlier.”

This, rather than visions of crafty parents making specious claims about their kids and getting luxurious help, is an actual issue. And Phillipson, in fairness, has been scrupulous in avoiding any impression of sympathy with the “overdiagnosis” brigade. Apart from anything else, it would be politically crazy to go anywhere near stuff like that: though people like me still have grave doubts about what it is about to announce, the government’s messaging about its SEND reforms is all about listening to parents and families, rather than impugning their motives. How could it be otherwise?

But when it comes to the politics of special needs and the rising sense that neurodivergence and disability are at the heart of a new culture war, that isn’t the whole story. Whatever the government says and whichever toxic talking-points it strives to steer clear of, its changes to the SEND system are still going to kick up a huge cloud of “overdiagnosis” innuendo, misinformation and base prejudice, and it is not going to be pretty.

Thanks partly to what Osborne and his ilk did to our politics, questioning other people’s needs and constantly alleging cheating and bad faith is now close to being a national sport. The “overdiagnosis” craze fits it perfectly, and if the government proceeds with its strongly-rumoured plans to cut down eligibility for EHCPs and the rights that go with them, a lot of the people who end up cheering it on are going to be reading from exactly that script.

For that reason, even if you are doing so with good intentions, this might be the worst time imaginable to be starting a debate about changing provision for SEND kids and their families and its place in the law. Osborne and his ilk, I suppose, would argue that once spending is reined in, the resentments they talk about (and actively encourage) will die down, and all will be well again. I don’t buy that at all, because there is a much greater danger – of the very act of scaling-down rights and provision while the media fills up with nastiness and prejudice further embedding horrible attitudes to disability and difference, to the point that they might become immovable. That has already happened to immigrants, people on benefits and disabled adults: is anyone surprised that SEND children and their families might be next?

Insisting that what seems to be “need” is really nothing of the kind

“Overdiagnosis” is already built into the conversation about changing the SEND system, partly because of how the politics of Special Needs is dealt with in certain sections of the media. For publications on the right of politics, the idea has an obvious appeal: whatever the facts, the ‘O’ word allows them to discount such factors as the legacy of the austerity they enthusiastically supported, a childhood mental health crisis, the consequences of the pandemic and the constant increase in our understanding of human psychology, and blame the Special Needs crisis on a kind of decadent, mollycoddling playing of the system that must be swiftly dealt with. This is of course, really just a rewrite of the same outlets’ script on poverty and “welfare”: you downplay the complex realities, and insist that what seems to be “need” is really nothing of the kind.

These, for example, are the choicest bits of a recent piece by The Spectator’’s Ross Clark:

Children are routinely being made out to be disabled in some way – either because their schools want more money or because their sharp-elbowed parents want them to have some advantage. I am no stranger to special needs education. My daughter, who is now an adult, attended special schools. But I can tell a racket when I see it – and this is one… SEND is mushrooming because too many people have a vested interest in it.

Another perfect example is a recent editorial in the Times – which, among its other points, said this:

“An under-explained catalyst of the rising expenditure is a recent sharp increase in diagnoses of milder psychological conditions, causing many children to be needlessly removed from mainstream education….It is reasonable to ask whether this sharp rise in EHCPs reveals a relaxation of diagnostic standards rather than an increase in underlying need. More troubling still is the extent to which EHCPs have become the linchpin of a system riddled with inefficiencies and perverse incentives.”

This is a pretty mind-boggling argument, with no evidence offered for the claims it makes. Who, for example, are the children taken out of mainstream schools because of mere “milder psychological conditions”? Is the argument here about kids who aren’t in the classroom at all, or entirely imaginary pupils who are in specialist settings on false pretences? Does the person who wrote it even know? Or is this less about the practicalities of education policies than a way of looking at the world, and a basic mistrust of what we now call neurodiversity?

If you want to sample an even less polite version of this stuff, brace yourself, and have a look at the comment threads that follow SEND coverage in the same paper (though they’re behind a paywall). The one that followed a news report on December 31st about what the government has planned for the SEND system is as good an example as any: “SEND has turned into education welfarism over my 45 years in schooling, including 10 years signing off all ‘statements’ for 2 councils,” wrote one contributor. “Many, many millions of public resources [sic]. The most needy children are squeezed by parents, schools and SEN ‘advocates’ who pressurise and game this weak system.”

“About time too,” said another. “Too much money wasted on pushy parents who want everything for their ‘special’ children. It’s all a very sad indictment of our society where everyone wants to be a victim, have special needs and have someone else provide ‘special ‘ treatment.”

This shades into the basic views of SEND apparently shared by Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and their followers in Reform UK. Judging by an instantly-infamous pamphlet put out during her campaign to become the leader of the Conservative Party, the same is true of Kemi Badenoch. Worse still, some of the same buttons are apparently being pushed by people inside the government, with overwhelming echoes of very familiar arguments about benefits.

Three times now, I have read one particular bit of poisonous briefing, variously described as “concerns within government” and stuff that has been briefed by ministers. It centres on allegations that EHCPs are used to fund provision including skiing lessons, “falconry experiences” and “equine-facilitated learning, under which children with mental health problems are given the opportunity to ride horses”. No context or evidence has been offered here: my first thought was of the horse-riding my son used to do (at the suggestion of his NHS Occupational Therapist) to improve his core strength and stability. But who cares about that? The stories do their work: like tales of welfare malingers with huge TVs and flash cars, they sow mistrust and scepticism about something that may soon be destined for the chop.

Where does all this stuff sit with the general public? A few days ago, I got a fascinating email from the pollsters at More In Common, which had a chunk of findings about SEND and talk of the government’s plans for change:

Our latest research finds Britons strongly support the legal entitlement to provision of SEND support: 60 per cent believe support should remain a legal entitlement for all who need it, even if this requires significant government spending. Only 26 per cent think eligibility should be tightened. WIth the SEND reform white paper expected by mid-March, changes to the funding could carry significant political risk for the government as 72 per cent of their 2024 voter base believe that the spending should remain a legal requirement, despite the high price tag. Additionally, parents represent another group likely to be at the centre of this backlash, as they stand out in their strong support for the funding as an entitlement (7 in 10).

But there was also much more unsettling material:

However, this support sits alongside growing concern about overdiagnosis. More than one third of the British public believe children are being diagnosed with SEND when it does not accurately reflect their needs. This view is particularly prevalent among Reform UK (51 per cent) and Conservative (53 per cent) supporters

I did a bit of cigarette-packet maths on the second passage: on this evidence, belief in SEND “overdiagnosis” extends to just over 1 in 5 of the population. The same, perhaps, could be said of the qualities of being gullible, excessively judgemental, and, you know, basically not being very nice.

But a)Given that Keir Starmer and his colleagues are pretty hopeless at the art of explaining their policies by using stories and narratives, b)Because it will be hard to rebut suggestions of “overdiagnosis” in the midst of reforms partly about saving money and cutting back people’s rights; and c)Because casting doubt on people’s needs is now such an in-built part of our national conversation, I fear we will soon be hearing much more of this stuff, with at least some of it put around sotto voce by people within government. For those of us already used to battling misconceptions and prejudice, 2026 threatens to be a trial: a year spent not only dealing with a watershed change to the education system, but some of the most misplaced and nasty ideas this increasingly stroppy little island has to offer.

• You can order Maybe I’m Amazed, my memoir about my autistic son James, our battle through the SEND system and how music saved us, here

EHCPs and the SEND tribunal that roots them in law are not the easiest things to explain. What they actually mean in practice, moreover, is increasingly obscured by all that toxic talk about “overdiagnosis”, and parents supposedly gaming the system and receiving bountiful luxuries at the taxpayer’s expense. The facts are actually much more prosaic, and suggestive of the exact opposite: the need for families to constantly fight to get even the beginnings of what their kids need. And they go something like this.

EHCPs can be in place for children and young people up to the age of 25. They contain – or should contain – specific details of both needs and the support and provision they entail, and they embody rights of redress and accountability that are there as soon as a family asks a council to assess a child for an EHCP. If that request is refused, the decision can be appealed against through the national SEND tribunal. Once an assessment happens, if the content of a draft EHCP doesn’t meet a child’s needs, that too can be taken to the tribunal, which can insist on changes to the educational elements of an EHCP, and also issue non-binding health and social care recommendations.

If an EHCP is in place, failure to implement what’s in it means a family can open the way to a judicial review in the High Court (they can also complain to the Local Government Ombudsman). Oh, and EHCPs are formally reviewed once a year, in a meeting which is meant to be attended by everyone involved: parents and carers, the relevant people from a child’s school, any therapists, and people from the local authority.

Now, contrary to what anyone might have read in certain news outlets, EHCPs are not ‘golden tickets’. Even at their most exacting, they simply set out needs and the commensurate specifics of support and help. And the fact that they are legally enforceable is often – how can I put this? – theoretical, in that plenty of people have EHCPs full of provision that they have to fight like hell to make real, often to no avail. The battling common to most SEND families, in other words, doesn’t stop when you get an EHCP. Instead, if you have one, you have a just-about-solid foundation on which to fight to get what your child needs. For many families – including mine – that is just about enough to you get a reasonable night’s sleep, most of the time.

In my son James’s case, for the ten or so years he was in mainstream education, his EHCP set out – among other things – one-to-one support based on a set of consistent methodologies, access to a quiet, calming environment, and an hour a week each of Speech and Language and Occupational Therapy from proper practitioners. On this basis, he made progress. The ideal of ‘inclusion’ actually happened. But right from the start, when appealed against our local council’s refusal to even assess him, there were regular occasions when we had to fight: when his support was first laid out, for example, it took long months of argument for some of his therapies to materialise. But the EHCP at least gave us the means to successfully make our case, and thereby stay sane. For a while, in fact, I kept ours in a drawer next to my bed.

At the last count, 638,000 children and young people in England had an EHCP, a figure up around 140% from 2015. As I wrote last week, that increase has happened for a multitude of reasons – but partly because everyday, ad hoc SEND support has been so stretched and squeezed that schools have concluded that applying for one is often the only dependable way of getting children any help at all. But that is where we are, and will remain for at least the time being: most of the families concerned well know that without a plan and the rights it enshrines, they would be left exposed and vulnerable, and their children’s futures would be clouded in much more doubt and anxiety.

And so to the current political moment. An education white paper is supposedly imminent (in its latest issue, the Spectator says it’s likely to materialise in “mid-March”), after over a year of briefings and rumours and ministers refusing to confirm or deny what they have planned for EHCPs and access to the SEND tribunal. The government seems to be set on drastically reducing both, by seriously cutting back the rights and entitlements of families entering the SEND system. Last summer, there was a very strong flavour of all this in comments from Christine Lenehan, one of the Department for Education’s senior SEND advisers, reported in Schools Week:

Asked if families should be worried that EHCPs might not survive in their current form, Lenehan – the government’s “strategic adviser” on SEND – said: “It depends what they’re going to worry about, really. Do I think the structure around EHCPs will change? Yes, I think it probably will, because it’s not fit for purpose. Do I think we will still be able to recognise and support children’s needs in any other structure? Yes.”
Does she envisage there being fewer EHCPs, more narrowed? “I think probably so. I think because that will take us back to original purpose.”
Asked whether this would involve narrowing EHCPs to only apply to children in special schools and whether they had any place in mainstream, Lenehan said: “I think, to be honest, that’s the conversation we’re in the middle of.”

Ten days ago, The Times ran a story strongly suggesting that these conversations had now reached their conclusion:

Children already receiving special needs support are not expected to be affected by the reforms [to EHCPs]. Those deemed to have very complex or acute needs would also be protected, as they are under the present system, which allows parents to take their local authority to court to challenge decisions on an EHCP. But hundreds of thousands of children with more moderate needs would no longer be covered under the programme, which ministers worry is being used as a “proxy” for access to basic resources.

The most ministers will say is that there will “always be a legal guarantee of additional support for children with SEND.” But this is so vague that it’s almost meaningless. “Additional support” based on what: specified needs, as with EHCPs? Or only what the education system is prepared to provide? And how will any legal guarantees actually be enforced?

Part of what’s going on here is depressingly obvious. For a long time, councils have been lobbying hard to dilute and restrict EHCPs and the powers of the SEND tribunal. This is their misplaced answer to the increasing cost of the education system’s mountain of failures since austerity started in 2010, and also the crassest of solutions to the fact that councils are constantly in breach of their legal SEND responsibilities.

The stats on this latter point are stark. In 2023-24, over 98% of SEND tribunal decisions that went to a full hearing were against local authorities and in favour of families. In 2023-4, the local government and social care ombudsman (LGO) upheld 1,043 cases regarding SEND provision – nearly 40% more than in 2023. Many of the complaints concerned were about the handling of EHCPs: only half of all EHCPs, for example, were produced by councils within the 20-week legal time limit.

The way ministers seem to want to restore the system to stability and calm is not by enabling councils to meet their responsibilities or insisting that they do so, but by drastically reducing the number of parents they have to deal with. In my more miserable moments, I often think that the Starmer government’s essential mission is to get the rusting machinery of the British state just about grinding on again, no matter what the human consequences. In this instance, if you disarm families and tell them they’ll have to put up with what they’re given, a lot of the fighting will stop and local bureaucrats will be able to relax. But at what cost? Answer: crap outcomes for kids and a world of anxiety and impossibility for their parents.

Political and news journalism often overlooks this human stuff, something I’m regularly reminded of when I speak to people who are familiar with the SEND system as a matter of everyday experience. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Joanne, whose story highlighted what it’s like to be sidelined by your local council, and the eventual benefits of managing to use your rights to fight back. She lives in the West Midlands, and has an autistic son, Blaine. Having fought for his diagnosis, she then moved on to a formal request for an EHCP assessment, which is when things got really difficult:

…when Joanne applied to start the process, even though reports from some of the council’s own specialists seemed to strongly support her case, she was turned down. By now, her son had started at his new school, with no dedicated help. “He was borderline self-harming,” she says. “He was pulling his eyebrows out individually, one by one and picking at the skin on his fingers. That was all due to his anxiety.” Joanne, meanwhile, was trying to push her way through endless layers of bureaucracy and paperwork. “It was horrendous,” she says. “It took over my life.” Blaine’s school was very supportive, but in the absence of any professional legal help, she concluded that they would only succeed if she gave up her job and devoted herself to the task full time.

Eventually, the national SEND tribunal decided in her favour. With the correct support in place, Blaine is now “absolutely thriving – he’s a completely different child”. Joanne, meanwhile, heads up his school’s SEND parents group and gives advice to people going through the same process. “The worst thing about it is the vast majority of parents take the ‘no’ and don’t realise they can fight it,” she says. “They’re not given any information from the local authority apart from jargon in a letter, and their child ends up suffering.”

People like Joanne do not want the government to get rid of their rights. What they’d sorely like to be free of is the grinding battles they usually need to fight to get their kids an EHCP containing the support they need, and the constant fear that even if promises are made, there is no guarantee they will materialise. They’d like, in other words, to live in a world in which councils met their legal obligations and the support their kids need was secure and dependable.

Wouldn’t that automatically mean the whole SEND system being overrun? I don’t think so. It would take ambition – and money – but the Department for Education could boost and revive everyday SEND provision and early intervention to the point that over time, many families – and schools – would decide there was no need to apply for as many EHCPs, and numbers would begin to go down accordingly. The fact that the majority of assessment requests are now made by schools rather than parents (which rather gives the lie to all that talk about ECHPs being the exclusive preserve of the sharp-elbowed middle class) certainly suggests as much. Indeed, if the government’s drive for meaningful mainstream inclusion and talk of hugely improved provision are taken at face value, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable projection.

But clearly, this is a very different prospect from drastically hacking down the numbers of plans by restricting them to kids with supposedly “complex” needs, and leaving thousands of families robbed of meaningful rights and therefore stranded, clinging to the hope that whatever reforms happen might eventually help them. Even if changes the SEND system are the right ones, councils (and schools, sometimes) will carry on making bad decisions and cutting families adrift – which is why the precious rights embodied by EHCPs will still be needed. In that context, given that the lives of families with SEND kids are already full of daily anxiety and uncertainty, attacking parents’ only effective means of holding the system to account would be an unbelievably cruel move. If you have to already hack your way through a system based on rights, how hard will people have to battle if those rights are taken away?

The greatest cruelty of all, however, might only arrive in a few years’ time. Reform UK remains ahead in the opinion polls, and widely tipped as the next party of government. We all know what its leading people – Nigel Farage, Richard Tice – think about SEND provision: they are devout believers in “overdiagnosis”, with an ever-increasing litany of pronouncements to match: claims that the sight of kids in lessons with ear defenders is “insane”, or that kids with Special Needs might be educated in empty churches. Without rights, many families would be completely at their mercy – one fact that surely ought to be keeping education ministers and Labour MPs awake, long into this winter’s increasingly chilly nights.

More info on the Save Our Children’s Rights campaign is here

You can order Maybe I’m Amazed – my memoir about my autistic son James, a family fighting through the SEND system, and the connecting magic of music – here.

Behind it lies an ever-increasing pile of botched policies and U-turns; up ahead, there are almost certainly going to be battles with campaigners voicing the increasing fears of parents, and anxious Labour MPs. Only around a month ago, the Department for Education launched a “national conversation” on its SEND changes, centred on nine face-to-face events and five online sessions. But there’s now an overpowering sense of everything suddenly being imminent.

The last time the system was changed was eleven years ago, when the Children and Families Act of 2014 launched a new system that was compromised – that’s a polite word – from the start by austerity. As the legislation began to take shape, there was a lot of fierce argument, and warnings of how the changes could go wrong. But they tended to happen on the fringes of politics and the media: back then, SEND was a largely niche concern, and the experience of being a Special Needs parent - my son James, who’s autistic, was nine back then; he’s now 19 – came with a sense of living with frustrations and impossibilities that were barely understood, let alone discussed and debated. You felt constantly lonely and ignored; the unfairnesses and injustices you kept colliding with never seemed to make it into the news.

But now look. SEND is everywhere. Newspaper columnists who have previously said hardly a word about the issues involved now write long pieces about what has supposedly gone wrong, and how to make it right. The BBC has just launched a (very good) weekly Special Needs podcast. The Times, I hear, now has a dedicated SEND agony aunt. Articles about how the politics of 2026 will play out put the Special Needs story front and centre.

Reform UK has brought its usual sensitivity and enlightenment to the conversation, most recently suggesting that SEND kids might be educated in empty churches (really). And all the time, toxic noise about “overdiagnosis” and parents supposedly gaming the system gets louder and louder: whether ministers like it or not, this warped aspect of the conversation is bound to define at least some of the debate about what they have planned.

How did we get here? The answer, like everything to do with SEND, is complicated, but the basics are to do with the overlooked way that spending cuts usually end up making things much more expensive. From 2010 onwards, councils and their children and education departments were gutted. The Sure Start centres that had been set up partly to spot SEND issues among pre-schoolers and deliver early intervention programmes were also endlessly cut back, to the point that a lot of what they did simply disappeared. School budgets were constantly squeezed - and at the same time, the traditionalist dogmas that had gripped the Department for Education triggered an exodus from mainstream provision into specialist schools (between 2012 and 2019 the number of SEND children in mainstream schools fell by a quarter, while the number attending special schools increased by nearly a third).

There were not nearly enough Specialist Schools to cope with all that rising need, which led to a desperate scramble for places and the grim spectacle of kids having to travel impossibly long distances - at no end of expense – to school. Meanwhile, children started school, not least after the pandemic, needing help with Speech and Language, behaviour, social skills and all the rest, and there was often barely anything there. And structural failings in the education system festered on: the best example is the measly pay rates of the Teaching Assistants (entry-level salaries start at £18,000 a year) who often keep SEND provision in mainstream schools going, but who are at the centre of a constant story about recruitment and retention.

And so to a massively important part of all this. In the midst of all this breakdown and dysfunction, there is one part of the system that offers families at least some accountability and security, in theory at least: Education, Health and Care Plans (or EHCPs), the successors to so-called Statements of Special Educational Needs that were brought in by the 2014 act. Backed by the official Special Needs tribunal, they make the provision they set out legally enforceable: no end of councils have a long record of failing to meet the relevant statutory duties, but here is a means of accountability that allows a lot of us to sleep at night.

As everyday, informal SEND support in mainstream settings has fallen away, EHCPs have become one of the only sure ways of getting kids extra help - which is why most of them are now instigated by schools. In January last year, there were 638,000 plans in existence, which is a lot. Their number is reckoned to have increased by 140% since 2014. But here’s the point that’s constantly misunderstood: that increase is a symptom of the Special Needs crisis, not its cause.

New year, new news

First, a health warning. On December 31st, the Times published a news story headlined “Children ‘to lose right to Send support’ except in severe cases”. It was a pretty exhaustive, well-briefed piece that ran through what were presented as the basic aspects of the government’s SEND plans.

There was a quote half-way through from the Department for Education: “These claims are speculative and do not represent government policy proposals”, which should be borne in mind when reading the below. But just about everything the article outlined seems to go with the grain of what we’ve been hearing and reading over the past year, so it’s worth taking seriously, and examining. As follows:

It’s grim to hear ever-louder indications that the government’s changes to the SEND system are going to be partly based on drastically cutting EHCPs, thereby threatening to leave children and their families stranded, seemingly on the less-than-dependable basis that the reforms will quickly come good.

If you currently have an EHCP, it seems you’ll probably get to keep it - but according to the Times piece, any new ones are to be restricted to those with “the most severe and complex requirements.” That would threaten the rights and entitlements that come with EHCPs starting to dwindle: would councils that already serially breach their obligations really worry all that much about rights and entitlements that were being sizeably phased out? There are also big questions to ask about how exactly “the most severe and complex requirements” would be defined, and what would happen to children and young people deemed not to have them. Would they suddenly fall outside the current model of provision that runs up until the age of 25? What of their health and care needs, and access to the Speech and Language therapy or Occupational Therapy that so many current plans contain?

One of Westminster and Whitehall’s most misplaced assumptions about SEND is that most kids sit somewhere on a linear scale, and you can separate out the ‘mild’, ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’ cases and ration help and support accordingly. Here, by contrast, are a couple of pretty common profiles of autistic kids: 1)a child with learning disabilities who can successfully be taught in a mainstream school with the right help and support, and 2)an academically high-flying neurodivergent child whose sensory needs mean that coping in a school is a complete non-starter. Who here is ‘mild’, ‘moderate’ or ‘severe’?

Aside from the fate of EHCPs, the other key issue at stake is all about a seemingly huge policy flip from specialist settings to “units” in mainstream settings, which we know will be a big part of what’s about to be announced. Only 15 out of 92 planned special and alternative provision (AP) free schools are now definitely going ahead, and councils will apparently decide whether to proceed with another 59 specialist projects, or receive “per-pupil cash to create places in existing [mainstream] schools”.

This is part of what will be a massive shift, as far-reaching and demanding as any change to the education system in years. Just before Christmas, the government announced £3 billion in capital funding for a “transformational expansion of specialist, calm learning spaces in mainstream schools, equipped with facilities to support children with special educational needs and disabilities”. But that only really covers the buildings: it still leaves huge questions about how kids will be taught, by whom, and at what cost.

There is, in fact, an overwhelming sense in the briefings and whispers we’ve heard so far of a vast set of new demands on schools, teachers, and TAs, which borders on the revolutionary. This, for example, was in an article published just after Christmas in the i newspaper:

Teachers and school staff will be expected to take a far greater role in identifying children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) under reforms to the system expected in the coming year… The move will mean more onus placed on teaching staff to both spot and meet the needs of children with SEND.

What would this mean in everyday terms? On top of all their existing responsibilities, teachers being so conversant and expert in autism, ADHD, dyslexia, learning disability and all the rest that they would not only identify specific needs, but decide on how to meet them and source extra help? And this is not the only ramping-up of schools’ responsibilities that’s likely to materialise. This is from the Times:

Under the proposals, the legal rights granted to parents over their child’s support would instead be taken over by schools, which would deal with councils and the government directly.

That sounds distinctly like a very 20th century answer to a set of 21st century problems: many parents and their rights being cut out of the system, and for lots of people, the SEND machine working on the basis that you simply get what you’re given. That will give thousands of families the fear, not least because there are also strong signs that in order to reduce costs, the kind of provision delivered in mainstream units could be hugely inadequate, certainly compared to specific, individualised support. From the same Times report:

Whitehall sources said EHCPs often ended up binding taxpayers into funding one-to-one sessions that could be replaced with a teaching assistant providing support for several children with special needs in a classroom.

At that point, a sharp intake of breath. My son was in mainstream from the age of 4 until he was 14. He reached his highpoint of inclusion towards the end of that time, when he was able to work independently for 20-25 minutes at a time in many of his subjects, and express his advanced musical ability in lessons and school productions. But he only got that far because his one-to-one provision had been so thorough and dependable. Without it, he would have crashed out of mainstream not long after he started.

Finally, the Times piece contains a depressingly predictable element: a few specious-looking stories, seemingly briefed from within Whitehall, about people supposedly abusing the system:

There is also concern in the government over the legal plans [i.e EHCPs] being used to fund activities that do not appear to be essential, including skiing lessons, falconry experiences and ‘equine-facilitated learning’ , under which children with mental health problems are given the opportunity to ride horses.

That sounds like borderline rubbish to me. But it follows a well-established pattern, seen recently when Rachel Reeves’s budget included a camped-up announcement of an end to Motability subsides for high-end cars (“non-economy brands” actually account for only 6% of the relevant scheme), on the basis that the system “was set up to protect the most vulnerable, not to subsidise the lease on a Mercedes-Benz”. It reflects the mounting sense that Britain is a country where we are constantly encouraged to assume the worst of anyone who receives help from the state - and, you know, fuck that.

Anyway, all the above has sparked a huge reaction. I’ll end with a quote from Rachel Filmer, a prime mover at the inspirational Special Needs Jungle and one of the founders of Save Our Children’s Rights, the campaign group I’m involved in which is focused on this year’s massively high stakes, and seeing off the worst of what seems to be on its way. “Removing legal rights,” she says, “would simply strip families of the only effective mechanism they have to secure support and challenge poor decision-making. Exacerbating the existing failures of the system in this way would have catastrophic implications for children and families, schools and our public services.”

It really would. More next week.

You can order Maybe I’m Amazed, my memoir about my son James and how music connects us, here.

Anyway…

At the brilliant WriteIdea festival in East London, I recently had a long chat with a woman, about her four year-old son. He was recently diagnosed with autism, and she talked about her sudden awareness of the grinding fight she faces to get him the extra support he will need at school. But in everything she said, there was also a sense of wonder about his talent for music - which, amid his difficulties with language, has given them a joyous way of communicating. He was not only playing the piano, she said: he could learn pieces by ear, and she had just started taking lessons on her iPad to help her keep up. When they play together, she said, she gets a lovely feeling of both amazement and connection.

Over the last eight months, I’ve had dozens of conversations like that, at events put on to promote Maybe I’m Amazed, the memoir I’ve written about my son James, his autism, and how, ever since he was a toddler, music - by The Beatles, Kraftwerk, The Clash and scores more, as well as the stuff we play ourselves - has been a massive part of our relationship. As I was researching the book and picking through academic papers and biographies of musicians and composers - from Mozart to Brian Wilson – the connections between music and neurodivergence became even more obvious. But when it was finally published, at pretty much every event I was hit by something else: the endless ways that all this plays out in lots of people’s everyday lives.

I’ve now done twenty dates, from Jersey to the Yorkshire Dales, via a handful of summer festivals. I’ve met parents and carers whose autistic kids are precocious experts on Ariana Grande, Iron Maiden, and George Harrison, often with the musical proficiency to match. I’ve had fascinating conversations with autistic people - many of whom have endured years of misunderstanding, and been diagnosed comparatively late – whose lifelong immersion in music has been a huge source of solace and inspiration. And just about everywhere, what people have talked about has gone much further, into the sheer complexity of human minds and brains, and things that we are only just starting to understand.

End Of The Road festival, in August

But at almost every event, there’s also been a more sinister and worrying subtext. 2025, after all, was the year that “overdiagnosis” became an inescapable buzzword – and particularly on the political right, an increasingly bitter scepticism about neurodiversity and human difference boiled over almost every week.

For a long time now, this point of view has been habitually voiced by a certain kind of newspaper columnist: I’ve written, for example, about the Times' writer Matthew Parris’s beyond-specious claims that “autism is a real thing for a relatively small number of people and a much-abused diagnosis for a huge number who are somewhere on a spectrum we’re all on”. In 2024, an adjacent point of view - all about “a narrative built on fragility and medicalisation” instead of “building resilience”- was the focus of news stories centred on Kemi Badenoch, who’s been making similar noises only this week. But these days, the most enthusiastic proponent of stuff like this is the deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, who seems to have become strangely and nastily obsessed.

In September, he said that England’s maze-like Special Educational Needs system is actually “being hijacked by far too many parents who are abusing the system, taking it for a ride”, and reduced the only available special school places often being miles from where kids live to people blithely getting “”free taxi transport for their children”. By November, he was telling anyone who’d listen that kids with sensory issues wearing ear defenders in classrooms is “insane”, warning of a “crisis of over diagnosis”, and blithely embracing no end of other familiar tropes (“One expert told me that parents are relying on neurodiverse labels to excuse poor parenting”), while insisting that young people should be taught to - oh yes – “develop some resilience, not reliance on a label”.

Clearly, it’s horrifying enough that all this the increasingly fixed position of a party that may very well end up forming the next UK government, with Tice – next to Nigel Farage, who seems to have much the same views – right at the heart of it. But overdiagnosis and the stuff that tends to come with it is also fashionable in other political places. There are less-than-subtle hints of it in Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s recently-announced “independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism”, which blurs into noises from the government about reviving the plans for so-called welfare reform that hit the skids over the summer (Badenoch’s latest toxic pronouncement is of a piece; in fact, a consensus between the two traditional Westminster parties seems to be hardening into reality).

Meanwhile, other aspects of the politics of neurodivergence continue to be pushed into the political foreground. Next year will see the long-delayed arrival of the government’s plans for sweeping change to England’s Special Educational Needs system. If they include the cutting-back of rights and entitlements that have been the subject of constant rumours and signals throughout this year, that will only feed the mood of cold foreboding: the Department for Education has been very careful not to endorse overdiagnosis theories – but if the worst of people’s fears materialise, they’ll feed a sense of needs being denied and waved away.

It’s going, then, to be big and noisy year. So, I will be writing here regularly (promise), mostly on Mondays – not just about everything above, but the fascinating threads that run between music and neurodivergence (like here), and much more besides. Please subscribe if you haven’t, and spread the word… and thanks again for all the support and engagement so far. It’s massively appreciated.

Here, for what it’s worth, are my albums of the year… please leave other tips below…

1. Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory - self-titled
2. Gwenno - Utopia
3. The New Eves - The New Eve Is Rising
4. Don Leisure - Tyrchu Sain
5 Divorce - Drive to Goldenhammer
6. Wet Leg - Moisturize
7. CMAT - Euro-Country
8. Richard Dawson - End Of The Middle
9. Tortoise - Touch
10. Panda Bear - Sinister Grift

My compilation/reissue of 2025 is Gilles Petersen presents International Anthems, which is just great. Happy Christmas!

There are more events coming: Jersey Festival of Words on Sunday September 28th, Durham Book Festival on Saturday October 11th, Ilkley Literature Festival on Sunday October 12th, and Manchester Louder Than Words on Sunday November 16th - plus quite a few that have yet to be announced. I’m also aware that I’ve yet to do anything in either the West Midlands or Bath and Bristol, so if anyone fancies hosting something, please let me know. You can buy the book here. Oh, and I was amazed to be on Jeremy Vine’s show on Radio 2 today, which is here, at around 1hr:04.

Anyway, service now resumes. I’ll be writing about music, which I’ll try to come at from fresh angles and perspectives, along the lines of the Wilson piece, and this one about the late Tom Verlaine. I’ll occasionally go back to the book, and develop and flesh out some of the themes in it, from why music is such an amazing conduit for human emotions to the neuroscientific aspects of talent. But now that Autumn is creeping up on us, there’ll also be new material about a huge political story: the government’s plans for changing England’s Special Educational Needs system, the grim increase in ideas about “overdiagnosis”, and what looks set to be a dramatic and anxious few months.

This much we know. Whatever its sense of drift and confusion, Keir Starmer’s administration has been regularly sending out signals about its strong intention to drastically change England’s system of provision for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, or SEND.

The Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, says superficially laudable things about her belief in inclusive mainstream schools, but we await any real details. There is a lot of talk, for example, about “units” in mainstream settings for SEND kids, and some schools that are said to point the way ahead – but there’s also a lot of anxiety about the prospect of dedicated individual help being replaced by rooms full of mixed groups of children that might amount to “inclusion” actually resulting in its opposite (our son James was a full member of his class in mainstream, but it took a lot of one-to-one support to sustain that).

A lot of what is going on reflects one of the grimmest aspects of government: the way that changes with huge implications for millions of people are fuzzily dangled in front of them, with such a lack of clarification or certainty that it amounts to a kind of polite torture.

In this instance, there is one particularly glaring example. Phillipson and her colleagues refuse to confirm or deny strong indications that they want to either drastically reduce or simply do away with one long-standing aspect of Special Needs education: the Education, Health and Care Plans (or EHCPs) that embody thousands of children and young people’s legal rights to extra support and help.

The official government line on what they have planned on this score is that “no decision has been made”, but insiders have been pretty clear about what is being considered: restricting EHCPs to children in specialist education, which would - as a matter of definition – make mainstream provision for SEND kids much more fragile and insecure, and probably send even more of them tumbling out of schooling, which is the exact opposite of what the government says it wants to achieve.

It looks like the legislative white paper containing the Education Department’s plans will be published in October. Between now and then – in the midst of the din about flags, immigration, and the dire predicament of the Treasury - there will be a rising argument about what might be about to happen, and how high the stakes are.

Here’s the most basic point. Rights matter. If a council does what many local authorities regularly do and turns down a family’s request for formal SEND assessment, parents currently have the formal right to appeal against that decision (we did – it’s in Chapter Four of the book). If the specific help their child needs isn’t offered to them, they can contest that as well. Once an EHCP is agreed and put in place, it embodies – in theory at least – genuine accountability. Anyone who’s read Maybe I’m Amazed will know that life as a Special Needs parent is often a matter of fear, worry, and regular rupture; it is no exaggeration to say that, even if we often have to fight to get the provision our kids are promised, the legal protections embodied by EHCPs allow thousands of us to sleep at night.

Right now, we’re being assailed by rumours, headlines and stories that seem to confirm some of our worst fears. Every week seems to bring yet another fit of panic: witness the fact that plans to harmonise ECHPs seem to have been quietly binned, which has sparked suspicions that they are indeed on their way out.

There are currently around 640,000 EHCPs in place in England. Contrary to all those cliches about pushy parents supposedly gaming the system and winning “golden tickets”, most are actually now instigated by schools, often as the only way of getting children the extra help they need. The wider context is a tangled mess of problems: poorly-paid teaching assistants leaving their profession, the catastrophic consequences for early intervention of the last government’s collapsing of SureStart children’s centres, and the legacy of an exodus out of mainstream schools into specialist provision, which triggered a dire shortage of places in the latter (which is a key reason why spending on SEND transport has ballooned – if the only appropriate placement is miles from home, that’s what councils have to provide and families have to deal with).

These issues, many of which go back to the start of Tory austerity, have put even more deep cracks in councils’ finances, which reflects an overlooked rule of politics and power: that if you do away with early intervention and everyday, ad hoc help and support, you will find - who knew? - that cuts usually turn out to be expensive. If the government were to start to fix these things, it would find that the kind of costly chaos it now faces would die down - and for some families, EHCPs would become less necessary. But before that happens, snatching them away would simply be cruel: further proof, in fact, that Whitehall and Westminster can only try and ease their financial woes by coming after people who already live difficult and stressful lives.

Now, Education Ministers are – entirely correctly – at pains to distance themselves from all that fashionable talk about “overdiagnosis” (which I wrote about here), but it inevitably warps and distorts the conversation about SEND. If a growing number of politicians and public voices - Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Jeremy Hunt, such newspaper columnists as Matthew Parris of the Times – go most of the way to saying that a lot of supposed needs and disabilities are simply exaggerated, made up or damaging to the people concerned, that will encourage arguments for simply hacking back provision. Whatever the government says, this is 2025’s mood music: on a bad day, it feels like the entire political class has resolved to come after families who already spend whole chunks of their lives constantly fighting officialdom and authority.

I’m now involved in a new campaign called Save Our Children’s Rights, which has one simple aim: to “protect the law for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.” It’s been set up by some of the brilliant people who started a petition against the government’s apparent plans, and secured enough signatures (100,000) to ensure a parliamentary debate, which is happening on September 15th. SOCR was launched with a letter to the Guardian signed by people involved in charities and campaign groups, as well as a handful of prominent people with strong connections to autism advocacy, including Chris Packham, Carrie Grant and Christine McGuinness. It’s worth me quoting a couple of paragraphs from the letter, because they point up exactly what is at stake:

Without statutory support, underpinned by necessary extra resources for schools, it’s extremely unlikely that ministers will achieve their aim of more children with SEND thriving, or even surviving, in mainstream education. A reduction or complete snatching-away of EHCPs in mainstream education wouldn’t mean their needs magically vanish. It would, instead, increase applications for already overcrowded special schools or mean they would be forced out of school altogether.

For more than 40 years, children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities have had a statutory right to an education that meets their needs. Set alongside catastrophic plans to cut benefits for disabled people, this raises the question of who we are as a country and the kind of society in which we want to live. Whatever the SEND system’s problems, the answer is not to remove the rights of children and young people. Families cannot afford to lose these precious legal protections.

This is where we are, as the nights draw in and the air gets chillier. One thing I’ve been struck by over recent years is the fact that SEND is no longer some hived-off, niche concern: it defines the lives of huge numbers of people, and their families and friends are well aware of the struggles they have to go through. In that sense, the possible showdown that might materialise this winter will be very big news.

To state the laughably obvious, the political atmosphere in this country is already full of trepidation. We have only just watched the government retreat from some of its terrifying plans for cuts to disability benefits; if the increasingly familiar spectacle of powerful forces coming after vulnerable and marginalised people is repeated, that same fear will only deepen. But so will something else, which the government ought to dear in mind: thousands of people’s determination to fight for their rights. What other choice do they have?

MUSIC!

We just got back from the End Of The Road festival, which is an amazing thing, positioned proudly at the cutting-edge and full of a lovely feeling of community. Three things there must be mentioned: Thursday night’s flawless set by Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, the Saturday-morning performance from The New Eves (who are the most original thing I’ve seen in ages), and the appearance by the brilliant Mount Kimbie, which massively raised everyone’s mood among Saturday’s downpours.

Its adjectival form is now routinely used in place of neurodivergent, so that this or that person is described as neurodiverse. But the concept was first coined – by the Australian writer and researcher Judy Singer – as a description of the whole of humanity, and the fact that all our minds work in fantastically varied ways. As she said back in 1998: “Our most taken-for-granted assumptions – that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell and sort information, in more or less the same way – are being dissolved.”

Human psychology, in other words, is a field brimming with differences, which can be somewhat crudely boiled down to a variety of broad cognitive styles. One of them contains a cluster of traits – of varying intensities – that define what is diagnosed as autism, and the community of autistic people. But some of the same human qualities blur out into a much larger array of human beings, best understood as having a few key qualities in common: set of talents, affinities and aptitudes that often sit alongside a tendency to find some other things difficult and onerous.

A certain kind of musician is a good example. Spend time with enough bands or read enough biographies, and you may well be struck by a certain psychological type. Often from childhood, a prodigious memory, heightened sensitivity to sound, ear for detail and instinctive mastery of chords and notes will be accompanied by some other clear traits: a liking for solitude, an aversion to the complexities of etiquette, or problems mastering what psychologists call executive function – planning how you get from A to B to C.

Here, perhaps, is the stereotype of the virtuoso-as-loner (lead guitar players are often a good example), the reclusive genius who would rather be in the studio than out in the world, or the jazz maestro fond of practising for sixteen hours a day. That recognition, moreover, might explain why the trailblazing psychiatrist Lorna Wing – who, with Judith Gould, came up with the idea of the autistic spectrum – once made a telling observation: “I do believe you need autistic traits for real success in science and the arts, and I am fascinated by the behaviours and personalities of musicians and scientists.”

Just to be clear: this is not about any kind of amateur diagnosis of persons living or dead. The idea of neurodivergence, in fact, means that any such crass and crude manoeuvre can be safely avoided. The point is simply that musical talent often seems to be part of a broad cognitive style, and what some people call genius often makes that very clear.

I thought about all this when I heard the news of Brian Wilson’s passing.

What first crossed my mind was the vivid memory of my dad’s cassette copy of The Beach Boys’ 20 Golden Greats, afternoons as a twentysomething spent marvelling at Sunflower and Surf’s Up, and the dizzying thrill of seeing him play Pet Sounds and Smile, accompanied by a pocket-symphony orchestra of musicians who made some of the most wondrous music I have ever heard.

But then I thought about a passage in my book Maybe I’m Amazed that begins with Mozart, ends with Nick Drake, and features Wilson in the middle:

According to one biography, ‘at the age of eleven months, Brian allegedly was able to hum the entire Marine Corps hymn.’ He once said his earliest musical memory was of listening to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue at his grandmother’s house, a piece of music that became his ‘general life theme’. When he was three, he understood chords, and could sing ‘right on key’. According to his brother Carl, ‘there were many years of his life when he did nothing but play piano’.

There was an early sign of these talents and traits, and Wilson’s brilliant mind. Early in his life, a church choirmaster in Inglewood, California, spotted that he had absolute pitch – the ability to instantly recognise particular tones and sing notes to order (around 1 in 10,000 people is reckoned to possess that skill; among people on the autistic spectrum, the figure is put at around 1 in 200). There is an apocryphal story about Wilson visiting an American radio station, hearing them play one of his records, coolly telling the DJ that his turntable was half-a-revolution-per-minute too fast, and being proved right.

Many neurodivergent people might recognise aspects of themselves in those recollections and observations. They may also empathise with the fact that the emotional impossibility of touring meant that Brian ceased being an onstage Beach Boy in late 1964 – and the sense that seems to run through his story, of a mind so hyper-sensitised to sound that reading about his feats of focus and creativity sometimes feels like watching someone anxiously walking a psychological tightrope (and, as with Smile, following the awful story of how he came to grief). Music, moreover, always seemed to be a much more reliable form of self-expression than words: he called his early sketches of music for Pet Sounds “feelings”, and most of his greatest songs have words contributed by the collaborators – Van Dyke Parks, Tony Asher – who would be given broad explanations of what exactly he wanted to them to say.

In 1966, Wilson was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition that involves depression, paranoia and auditory hallucinations. He did not have the kind of mind that was suited to intoxicants and excess, and so it proved. But there may have been reasons for his awkward relationship with the demands of business and promotion that ran more deeply than that. At the height of his success, Wilson’s home was said to be scattered with unsigned contracts and un-cashed cheques. He was clearly not someone given to small talk, and resistant to the rules of conversation and everyday interaction. People with his kind of talent are often like that.

When his death was announced, my YouTube feed filled up with a kind of clip that spoke volumes about who he was: interviews, or appearances at awards ceremonies, that betrayed a deep unease with such rituals, and a clear wish to be somewhere else, immersed in the magic of creativity. I interviewed him – on the telephone – in 2004 as he promoted an album titled Gettin’ In Over My Head, and he answered my questions in no more than five or six words apiece. It felt needless and rather cruel. But this remains the way the music industry treats too many of the talented people who make its millions, and the reason – perhaps – that so many succumb to addiction or breakdown. Those things, to state the blindingly obvious, were present in his life-story.

When I saw him play at Manchester Apollo in 2004, he played the belatedly-realised Smile in its entirety, as well as the inevitable classics. It was a dizzying evening, full of a level of emotion that was impossible to articulate. When he led the band into Good Vibrations, Heroes And Villains, and a run of early Beach Boys hits, it triggered euphoria; at the end, his rendition of Love And Mercy made me cry.

Mid-way through the show, the power suddenly failed, and in the sudden absence of everything that made such an occasion familiar to him, he looked panicked. But his guitar player and musical director, the late Jeff Foskett, knew what to do – and in retrospect, I recognise a a regular part of my life as the parent of someone neurodivergent, when we are hit by sudden shocks or surprises: he came up with quiet and measured words of reassurance, telling Wilson that everything was going to be OK, and reminding him that whatever happened, everyone was here to help.

Everything then came back on. Wilson’s face took on an expression of beatific relief. And then the music resumed: a reminder not just of its creator’s brilliance, but the amazing complexities of the human mind.

You can buy Maybe I’m Amazed here

I’ve written recently about rising worries about what the government has planned for the rights of children and young people with disabilities and Special Educational Needs. The petition opposing any so much move hit 100,000 signatures this week: it’s here.

She describes how one of her interviewees, a woman called Poppy, rejects being characterised as a “person with autism”. That, Poppy tells her, “sounds like I’m carrying autism around in a bag”: instead, she favours the straightforward description “autistic”. This reflects a common modern preference, but O’Sullivan evidently doesn’t have much time for it, sticking to the “with” formulation throughout what she writes. The Age of Diagnosis is that kind of book: as I was reading it, I went through the guide to talking about autism published by the UK National Autistic Society (which is hardly the most militant of organisations), and I was struck by how often she drives a coach and horses through its recommendations. This is the kind of performance one usually associates with a certain kind of newspaper columnist: right down to the author’s basic choices of words, The Age Of Diagnosis is clearly aimed at confronting modern sensitivities with what she sees as the blunt thump of old-fashioned honesty. Put another way, it is self-consciously non-woke.

O’Sullivan is a consultant neurologist of 20 years’ standing, who specialises in epilepsy. For the most part, The Age Of Diagnosis is elegantly written, and consistently thought-provoking. And from a commercial perspective, her timing is superb: just as arguments about the supposed “overdiagnosis” of various physical and mental conditions are echoed by politicians, it fleshes out what that might mean – she bemoans the “pathologising of distress” and “the sanitising of the messy truth of life through biology” - and raises the volume some more.

It has been pretty ecstatically received. In The Guardian, the geneticist and writer Adam Rutherford praised what he said was an “outstanding” book “full of compassion, care and grace.” The review in The Times said it was “lucid and empathetic”.

The subtitle is “Sickness, Health and why Medicine Has Gone Too Far, which chimes with recent pronouncements from Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch. The basic message also blurs into the mood music surrounding the British government’s apparent quest to limit access to legally-guaranteed Special Needs provision. O’Sullivan, just to make this clear, tends to approach her subject matter in a more nuanced way. There again, the fact that she has promoted the book on Fox News (where she characterised “severe” autism as an “illness”) suggests that she is more relaxed about common threads running between her book and some very malign political forces than a lot of other people might be.

***

Her autism chapter comes after explorations of Huntington’s Disease, followed by Lyme Disease and Long Covid. One of her key convictions, it soon becomes clear, is that allowing some people to label themselves with the ‘A’ word deprives others with much more complex needs of the consideration they deserve. “They are now in a queue for resources alongside people with considerably fewer difficulties,” she says. “My patients with severe autism are not represented on TikTok, where people celebrate their great relief at being diagnosed and call for affirmative diagnosis and ask for words like ‘spectrum’, ‘disorder’ and ‘impairment’ to be removed from the language of autism. Those with the greatest need are becoming invisible.”

As the parent of an autistic son who has learning disabilities and goes to a specialist school, I understand some – some – of that concern. There are often tensions between autistic people who are able to advocate for themselves and the parents and carers of those who are not. It sometimes feels as though speaking on behalf of your autistic child is seen in some quarters as rather passé. Towards the end of my book Maybe I’m Amazed, there’s a flavour of all this, in a passage about the new(ish) prominence of autism in the media, and the kind of voices and experiences that are sometimes in danger of being overlooked:

Neurodiversity applies to autism itself: because it’s a spectrum condition, different kinds entail different ways of thinking about it.. But some people seem to get more attention than others. There is a lot of talk about the benefits of the “neurodiverse” workplace; I have read people claiming that some autistic people’s intense focus and attention to detail might accelerate their career prospects…these are welcome signs of more open, enlightened attitudes. But they also run the danger of drowning out the complicated needs of people like James.. .If the promise of neurodiversity is going to be realised, these people - and all the complicated questions they highlight - need to be in the foreground of any conversations about autism and what it demands.

But that’s about as far as I can go. O’Sullivan’s position is hardcore: she accepts historical under-diagnosis, but thinks we are now in the midst of an over-correction – and allowing the people she sees on TikTok to be diagnosed as autistic means that attention and resources are unfairly pulled away from people whose autism is more intense and debilitating. She also wonders whether some of the former group can even be meaningfully described as autistic - and, moreover, if labelling them as such might hold them back from participating in society, loading them with a burden and sense of stigma they should not have to carry. That points to a clear conclusion: that in order to properly look after the most intensely autistic people, we should be more sceptical about the supposed needs of others, free them from the potential shame of diagnosis, and sign up to a new scepticism about how the idea of the autistic spectrum is manifested not just in diagnosis – but by extension, in how we deliver education and care.

And on all that stuff, I could not disagree more.

***

As I say in my book, in my fearful moments “I think of James as a very fragile human being, dependent on the kindness of others.” But at the same time, I understand that he is part of a psychological family that also includes people whose autism presents very differently, and who might not have been diagnosed 10, 20 or 30 years ago. One of O’Sullivan’s big jumping-off points is the fact that between 1998 and 2018, autism diagnoses rose by 787% in the UK. To some people, that might look shocking. I am not sure. A useful point of comparison is dyslexia. To quote from one very incisive piece of writing, “formal research began in the early 20th century, and by the time of the Isle of Wight studies in the 1970s, its prevalence among children of average intelligence was recorded at around 3.7% Today? It’s estimated between 10-17%…. No one’s wringing their hands about the ‘dyslexia epidemic.’ Why not? Because we’ve largely accepted it as a legitimate condition, not a threat to the social order.”

We know a lot more about autism and its complexities than we used to. And when I meet autistic people who have little or none of James’s problems with language and talk to them about their lives, there are still big points of intersection. The same point is borne out in his own family tree. And this is a good thing. If people like my son are shoved into self-contained categories with headings like “severe” and “profound”, and people relentlessly talk about low mental ages, rigid and repetitive behaviour, and all the other antediluvian cliches applied to more intense kinds of autism, it reduces them to a set of pitiful cliches. The fact that he has the same psychological label as, say, Chris Packham and Gary Numan reflects common traits. It also de-others him and his autism. But most importantly, it is true to the fact that he, like all autistic people, is as complicated as anyone else.

O’Sullivan freely uses such words as “severe” and “mild”. I well know why they are used in connection with autism, but I’m also keenly aware of their limitations, as a matter of lived experience. My son’s peer group, for example, includes one loquacious late teenager who is not learning disabled, but I have seen him have the kind of intense meltdowns that James has never got near. A couple of months ago, I met a young woman who was fiercely academic and amazingly articulate, but had not been to school since she was 11 because the sensory overload and constant need for human interaction were simply too much.

James, by contrast, is mostly OK with school. He finds conversation trying and has a somewhat limited sense of danger. There is a gap between his receptive and expressive understanding, which is another way of saying that he comprehends a lot more than he can say. If I was forced to, I suppose I could just about put him and these two contemporaries on the linear continuum that O’Sullivan seems to believe in. But that would do neither them nor the intensity of some of their autistic traits any kind of justice. Whose are “mild” and “severe”, and in which ways? The spectrum, as a lot of us now know, is decidedly non-linear: more like a constellation of traits and qualities that vary in intensity than a straight line.

O’Sullivan implicitly rejects that. Moreover, she seems to think that in theory at least, she could adjudicate on who deserves a diagnosis and who doesn’t - something that apparently ought to centre on a simple point beyond which “when new people are being diagnosed… there is no evidence that it is benefiting them, or when the diagnosis is causing more harm than good.” She quotes a few people in her chapter about autism, but there is no-one who has lived out her contention that an autism diagnosis can have a negative impact on people. Funny, that.

***

Her writing subtly recasts aspects of our understanding of autism to assist her argument. A good example is how she briskly tells the story of how the work of Lorna Wing (and Judith Gould, who goes unmentioned) led to the concept of the spectrum, which she seems to see as the thin end of what has turned out to be a regrettable wedge. “On examining a large cohort of children attending child psychiatric services in Camberwell, London,” she says, “Wing and colleagues decided that autism was much more common than had previously been suspected and affected people with a variety of intellectual abilities, not just those with severe learning problems.”

The word ‘decided’ does a lot of work there. It sounds as if what happened was somewhat arbitrary: a projection, perhaps, of things Wing wanted to see on to reality. But compare the above to the account offered in the history of autism In A Different Key, by the American writers John Donvan and Caren Zucker:

“She and Gould embarked on a marathon field investigation, spending nights and weekends knocking on doors in Camberwell… Limiting their investigation to children who were fifteen or under, they set out to see all the cases of diagnosed autism in that group. But that was just the beginning. Beyond that, they wanted to see every child who was reported as displaying any traces of developmental disability more broadly defined. That meant intellectual impairment, speech delay, or any kind of learning disability. Scattered autistic traits such as repetitive interests, or social aloofness, also counted. Wing and Gould conducted one-on-one interviews with more than 900 teachers of kids whose histories had been recorded… So labour intensive was the sheer legwork aspect of the project that it was four years before Wing and Gould were ready to start publishing.”

Clearly, there was more going on here than someone “deciding” what autism was or wasn’t: the necessary work, moreover, was more thorough and taxing than writing self-consciously controversial books.

O’Sullivan misrepresents the meaning of the term neurodiversity. “It is not actually a medical term,” she says, “but it sounds like one, so it has a biologising, pathologising effect.” There is a quote from the woman reckoned to have come up with the term, Judy Singer, which makes its coining sound superficial and cynical: “Neurodiversity sounds really important and it will legitimise our claims to be taken seriously.”

Again, this is a matter of rhetoric rather than accuracy. Neurodiversity encapsulates the simple recognition that human brains work differently (as Singer eloquently wrote, “our most taken-for-granted assumptions – that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way - are being dissolved”). It is the absolute reverse of “biologising” and “pathologising”. Also, contrary to what O’Sullivan writes, depression is not “commonly referred to” as a neurodivergent condition, certainly not by anyone who knows the basics of what neurodivergence actually means.

***

And so the infuriating words pile up. “When children who are bullied, have eating disorders, who have been abused, who self-harm or who are suicidal have these experiences explained through the lens of autism,” O’Sullivan writes, “it risks blaming their personalities and their vulnerability on something that is out of their control and cannot be fixed.” Does it? Really?

An autism diagnosis, she says, might “become a self-fulfilling prophecy as some will take the diagnosis to mean they can’t do certain things, so won’t even try.” There is a reference to “one Turkish study [which] suggested that prejudice, a child’s awareness that they are different and time spent in special education meant autistic children were less likely to be included in sports.” She admiringly quotes the French psychiatrist Eric Fombonne’s claim that “carrying an ASD diagnosis may unduly constrain an individual’s range of social and educational experiences and have long-lasting effects on their identity formation.”

Well, maybe. But try being an autistic person trying to make your way through school, work and whatever else without a diagnosis and the support it can bring. The evidence of decades - centuries! - of underdiagnosis suggests that such an experience will have some pretty considerable effects on your “identity formation.” Put another way, diagnosis is usually the most reliable way of unlocking help that, in contrast to what O’Sullivan says, enables people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t or couldn’t. That clearly applies to education, but also rings true for late-diagnosed adults who, say, get help from personal assistants who enable them to lead better and fuller lives.

On autistic women and girls and masking, O’Sullivan makes some very questionable points indeed. She makes reference to “the oft-made claim that we don’t really know what autism looks like in girls.” These days, I am not sure any such claim could be made. She also refers to theories that girls and women’s autistic traits are too “subtle” to be noticed, which is a word that helps her argument, but does not really chime with reality: the key point about those traits is not that they are “subtle”, but that they are masked, which is very different. But on that score, O’Sullivan also has things to say. “The masking theory tells us to assume autism is there even if it can’t be seen,” she says. But that, again, is a tellingly self-serving characterisation. The point here is not that autism can’t be seen: it’s that it’s concealed, with often disastrous consequences.

Her most remarkable passage is about what she sees as “the theory… that mild autism diagnosed in a timely manner will result in support that will help a person to prosper.” She goes on: “Rates of autism diagnoses have been steadily rising for over thirty years - time enough to see the benefit of these diagnoses - and yet it’s hard to find any.” In fact, she says, “there are more people with autism and more people with other mental health conditions too.”

She tries to clinch this point by citing the fact that in the countries including the US and UK, rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders, school dropout rates, mental health problems, and people signed off work have all increased in the same period. “Of course, there are many other factors that impact mental health,” she says. There really are: poverty, insecurity, the rise of social media, and about 4000 things besides. The idea that aggregated national statistics for rampant social and medical problems can tell anyone anything about the consequences of individual autism diagnoses is absurd.

That kind of absurdity is usually concealed by O’Sullivan’s measured prose, but it surfaces again. “The stigma of autism has been associated with low self esteem among children,” she says at one point. There is no need for that to be the case: stigma, by definition, is socially determined, and the modern notions of neurodiversity and neurodivergence have begun to push things in the opposite direction. But I know the kind of ideas that run the risk of sustaining that stigma. You see them when certain people refer to autism as a “brain disorder” with “symptoms”, in paragraphs dangerously close to other ones that use the word “disease”.

A few examples. In December, an unnamed “senior official” from within government talked about ending entitlements for children at the “lighter” end of ADHD and autism, and “thousands fewer pupils” having access to EHCPs. Earlier this month, one of the Department for Education’s key Special Needs Advisers said that she was among the insiders considering whether EHCPs “are the right vehicle to go forward”. and acknowledged that she is “in the middle” of conversations about whether EHCPs should be used in mainstream education, and only apply to pupils in special schools.

In the last week, under the headline “Children with special needs in England may lose legal right to school support plans”, The Guardian has confirmed that the Department for Education is developing a new system for Special Needs support, and reported that the relevant minister, Catherine McKinnell, has “declined to rule out narrowing or replacing EHCPs altogether.” The Times’s story was even more stark: “Ministers ‘to scrap special-needs plans’ in cost-saving measure,” it said, going on to quote a “government source” – yes, one of those again – saying that ministers were now minded to restrict EHCPs’ educational rights to those with “very high and complex needs.”

A legislative white paper is on the way - with, I hear, a period of consultation. Any big changes will have to pass through parliament. And at the moment, what’s being planned is couched in what officialspeak calls “deniability”: the government’s public line is all about no decisions having yet been made, and warm and fuzzy words about the importance of improving Special Needs education. But clearly, something is afoot, and the kind of terrified and furious noise the government cannot control is rising fast. This, for example, is from today’s Sun - it’s by Lisa Lloyd, the author of the recent book Raising the SEN-Betweeners:

Note the entirely justified gravity of the language: “The government is looking at removing the the rights of children with additional needs to have extra support in school.” No sooner had my phone pinged with news of that piece than I was alerted to an item on Good Morning Britain featuring the SEND parents and campaigners Carrie Grant and Hayley Harding, which was followed by another media appearance from Catherine McKinnell. What transpired was nothing if not predictable: the minister was presented with the opportunity to “guarantee” that rights to EHCPs would not be taken away, and she skirted around the question.

There is a familiar awfulness about all this, centred on the contrast between the way politics and power works, and the everyday lives millions of people have to live. The average SEND parent is often sleepless, tired out from form-filling and endless unreturned calls, and obliged to maintain – if they can – the delicate mental balance between taking care of today’s business while trying to keep a lid a constant underlying anxiety about the future. If politicians and officials spend months putting out menacing smoke signals, saying things while also denying them and refusing to give any clear indication of where things are headed, it amounts to cruelty: a huge bundle of anxiety and uncertainty colliding with lives that are already full of those things.

To state the blindingly obvious, all of this threatens to blur into the mess the government is already in on its plans to cut disability benefits. In the wider culture, whatever ministers’ intentions, the cacophony about EHCPs and families’ basic rights is already starting to intersect with the often nasty and ill-informed debate about “over-diagnosis” of neurodevelopmental conditions, and the sense that autism and ADHD are now part of the culture wars. Among SEND parents, many of whom who are among the most networked and battle-hardened people you will ever meet, there is a palpable sense of people preparing for a fight.

A few crucial points need to be made here. England’s SEND system is in the midst of crisis because of the legacy of years of austerity, and councils being hollowed out while early intervention was hacked back – not to mention the changes to provision in the Children and Families Act of 2014, which were never properly funded. The grim folly of pushing kids out of mainstream settings into special schools while local authorities couldn’t keep pace with that change has long been obvious. So has the impossibility of paying teaching assistants a pittance while expecting them to perform a massively important role in SEND education. And so the mess goes on. I explored the nuts-and-bolts of it here. Suffice to say that 1)The only way to save the money that goes on SEND in the long term would be to strategically spend more right now – on reviving SureStart, restoring councils’ children and education departments, stemming the exodus of TAs from their profession etc., and 2)The 570,000 families whose kids have EHCPs are not the source of the problem.

A last word. If you’ve read my book Maybe I’m Amazed, you’ll know about my autistic son James’s progress through mainstream education, the intensive support we had to fight for, and what it meant for him. Friends. Huge improvements in his Literacy and Numeracy. Progress with his powers of self-expression that meant that he was usually spared the kind of frustration and anger that, if kids do not get the right provision, can balloon. And, most gloriously of all, his experience of being taught and encouraged by a brilliant music teacher at his middle school, something that marked his personal high-point of what professionals call “inclusion”.

If all this was crystallised in a single occasion, it was the night that James opened his school’s annual talent show with renditions of When The Saints Go Marching In and The Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting For The Man. Here’s a passage from the book:

To us, the meaning of the six minutes James and I have just spent on the stage is pretty obvious. If you are repeatedly told what your child can’t do, it starts to eat at you. Certain words hover over you: “severe”, “profound”, “impairment”. You miss superlatives; whatever successes your child achieves, they don’t tend to feel like the same ones other kids experience. But here is something James can do – brilliantly, fantastically, wonderfully – on the same terms as everyone else. Better still, he loves doing it, and it makes him the centre of attention.

It all felt like something close to magic - but like all his achievements, it happened because of dependable support and help, and a basic set of rights now under threat from a government that is already in deep political trouble, and seemingly fond of picking fights that it ends up losing.

It is going to be an interesting summer, to say the least.

You can buy Maybe I’m Amazed here.

I’ll do a long and in-depth post soon about rumblings from Westminster and Whitehall about drastic changes to England’s Special Educational Needs system, which are now sounding more specific – and worrying – than ever.
Christine Lenehan, one of the government’s key Special Needs advisers, said this week that she is among people considering whether the Education, Health and Care Plans (or EHCPs) that currently set out children and young people’s provision as a matter of legal entitlements “are the right vehicle to go forward”. She also claimed that most kids with EHCPs “don’t need health and care” so much as “a really good, focused education”, and acknowledged that she is “in the middle” of ongoing conversations about whether EHCPs should be used in future mainstream education, and only apply to pupils and students in special schools.
This is all frightening stuff. In the wake of the announcement of all those cuts to disability benefits, it points to a possible phasing-out of children and families’ rights, which would profoundly change how SEND works, and call time on one of the few ways people can hold the relevant authorities to account. It also seems to be built on completely topsy-turvy logic: as many families with SEND children in a mainstream schools will know, it’s only EHCPs that make education in those settings possible. As I explain in Maybe I’m Amazed, that was certainly was our experience, for eleven years. Obviously, I’ll be following all this very closely. But for now, I’ll point you to a characteristically forensic piece on Special Needs Jungle.

Events!
I’ll be talking about Maybe I’m Amazed, music, autism, creativity and neurodivergence and much more at the Derby Book Festival on Wednesday March 28th at 5.30pm. Details here. On Saturday June 1st at 2.30pm, I’ll be doing the same with Simon Baron-Cohen at the Hay Festival. Info and tickets here.

You can buy Maybe I’m Amazed here.

Anyway…

Our first trip to Dartmoor was a matter of insanely bad timing. It was February 2020 - only a month before the start of the pandemic – and the UK was under attack from what my research reminds me was Storm Dennis (the menace). Perhaps because of this part of Devon’s famous micro-climate, what that meant for our half-term visit to the countryside around Okehampton was instantly clear: among the worst rain and wind I have probably seen, sometimes so extreme that it seemed grimly funny.

I didn’t have the experience of hillwalking that I have managed to acquire since, and I was also in the grip of the mindset some psychologists call Monotropic Superdrive, newly obsessed with Dartmoor and desperate to see it up-close. That meant two completely ridiculous attempts to do at least some walking. The first took us to a car park, where we watched two other bonkers people get instantly soaked, while the gales inflated their clothing and made them look like drenched human balloons (we instantly gave up, and went to see the first Sonic The Hedgehog movie). The second time, I insisted we try and climb up a modest-looking hill to have a look at the famous Scorhill stone circle, whereupon we were instantly blown back down, with the constant sting of high-velocity hailstones as an added bonus.

A word of advice, then: always check the weather, and know when to bow out. But on the third and final day, we actually made it somewhere: around the Fernworthy Reservoir and through the woods to the two stone circles known as the Grey Wethers. It wasn’t raining that day – much – and I can clearly recall the moment which started an addiction that hasn’t subsided since: when I turned around, looked North (yes, I had a map and compass), and took in a huge and bleak expanse of emptiness, seemingly without end.

If you can boil Dartmoor’s basic allure down to one thing, this is it. Just look:

I know: to some eyes, the moor is a bleak and soullless place, and this might look like something close to hell. To state the blindingly obvious, it looks like it does thanks to human intervention: had our ancestors not hacked down most of the trees, it would be a much more green and comforting place, with abundant flora and fauna. But Dartmoor grips some people’s souls, I think, because it delivers experiences that are vanishingly rare: isolation, silence, and the chance to leave behind the cacophonies and distractions that constantly intrude on our lives.

We now go whenever we can. My son James, whose autism means he luxuriates in the quiet and calm of the best outdoor spaces, is just as keen on Dartmoor as me, and now well-acquainted with whole swathes of it. As a matter of instinct, he instantly seemed to grasp how to interact with its landscape: the fact that its rocky tors are there to be climbed, that the views its peaks deliver on clear days are profoundly mood-altering, and that there is an inarticulable thrill in long hours spent walking around it.

In Maybe I’m Amazed, there’s a passage about watching him soak up a view of Great Langdale in the Lake District:

Without any prompting, James marks the halfway point by purposely walking twenty yards off the path, towards a solitary outcrop. For twenty minutes, he then sits alone, looking out over Great Langdale, slowly shifting his attention from side to side, in complete stillness and silence… I think I understand what he is luxuriating in: there are no human interactions to negotiate, and no prospect of police sirens, dogs, or hand-dryers – just infinite space, and the sense of being one tiny part of a serene and spectacular whole. As much as when he is playing or listening to music, this experience seems to go right to the core of who he is, and when he is most authentically himself.

This is what happens whenever we go to Dartmoor.

The spark for this post was a very good new book: Rock Idols by Sophie Pierce and Alex Murdin, which evokes and explores the moor by zeroing on 28 of its tors, exhuming some of the literature and art it has inspired, and presenting some of Alex’s brilliant drawings of its landscape. Dartmoor, they write, is “all about dirt and drama, mud and magic”. They describe “dim shapes looming dark and cold out of swirling mist; blue shadows melting into a river of bluebells; hazy stacks shimmering under an adder-baking summer’s sun.” It’s all there, but what they keep coming back to are those rocky summits, their anthropomorphic features, and their mixture of “familiarity and granite inhumanity”.

The book is the same dimensions as most walkers’ guides. It’ll fit snugly into the outside pocket of a rucksack. Rock Idols will be coming with us on our next trek, very soon.

Current listening!
Album: Ian Hunter, Defiance Part 2: Fiction (2024). Tracks: Jeff Finlin, Sugar Blue (2001?); Tom Misch, Red Moon (2025)

P.S I’m now on Instagram as johnharriswriter. Here’s James playing The Clash’s Career Opportunities on the organ at the former United Reformed Church (now the Rye Bakery) in Frome:

I first heard it blaring from the kitchen: an E major chord, ringing out in perfect 4/4 time, with a strum for each beat. Then the faint squeak of fingers realigning on the strings, before another bell-like strike over another couple of bars: C major this time – blam-blam-blam-blam/blam-blam-blam-blam – and then everything hesitantly starting again.

For the previous six months or so, James had been accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar in the most minimal style: two notes for each chord, played on the lower strings a la Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath. This is a trick most guitar players will know from their first steps; he used it for everything from Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding to AC/DC’s Touch Too Much and The Smiths’ Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before. But what he was now trying was new: what guitar players call root chords, with a full range of notes and the arduous challenge of slowly learning fluent finger movements, so the early gaps in the music start to gradually narrow.

Two weeks on, James continues to work on this, in the focused, self-contained way he masters most things. My contribution has so far centred on occasionally introducing new chords, and repeatedly directing him to the manual that has done a much better job than me of showing him the way: an A4 hardback, ordered from some or other second-hand seller on Amazon.

Denny Laine died in December 2023, in Florida. He was the Birmingham-born guitarist and creative collaborator who lasted through every line-up of Paul McCartney’s band Wings. Before that happened, his key moments in the history of English popular music were The Moody Blues’ 1965 hit Go Now (a cover version), and a brilliant song titled Say You Don’t Mind, most notably covered by Colin Blunstone of The Zombies. But I sometimes wonder whether his most enduring contribution might have been Denny Laine’s Guitar Book, a pithy guide to the instrument and how to play it that must have inspired thousands and thousands of players.

On the cover, he sits among musical notes in his regulation bohemian chic, looking as inscrutable as many Wings fans will recall. “I never thought of going for lessons,” he writes in the introduction, “because lessons were what you had in school, so I carried on working things out for myself… And that, really, is why I’ve put this book together - to be a handy source of tips, like the help more experienced players gave to me.”

James is using it because I did. It was published in June 1979, around the time Wings put out their final album, Back To The Egg. Having seen Denny plugging it on some or other kids’ TV show – it might have been ITV’s Magpie – I borrowed it from Wilmslow library when I first started teaching myself to play, and it gave me my first chords: C major and G7.

I learned them using Denny’s patent method: felt-tipping the fingernails on my left hand yellow, pink, purple and green, and then following the vivid images of each chord in the book. I went from there to D, E, F and all the rest – and, eventually, to eye-wateringly painful barre chords. Which is to say: whereas plenty of teach-yourself books were abandoned amid tedium and arcana, this one really worked.

It had only one downside. One day, another session practising my latest chords blurred into leaving the house for school, and I left with the colours still on my nails. The result was a great burst of laddish mockery – homophobic, by any reasonable standard – that went on for at least a week. As I recall, I didn’t actually mind that much: it was proof that Denny and I stood well away from the herd, and that learning the guitar involved trials and tests. So I carried on: more chords, more pain (“Played it till my fingers bled”, as Bryan Adams would soon sing), and the gradual onset of fluency and confidence, which took months.

That’s the main thing about learning an instrument. There is absolutely no instant gratification. In world where the smartphone might have killed boredom, I sometimes wonder whether people still have the necessary patience, but the sheer number of guitars sold around the world shows that they must have. You have to endure sounding nothing like your heroes – clunk, fumble, squeak, clang – in the hope that you eventually will. How you get from all the pain and frustration to any kind of dexterity and confidence seems almost absurd. It takes faith: mine came from the picture on page 85 of Denny and Paul casually playing their acoustics, and the belief that sooner or later I would be able to do the same.

That’s roughly where James is right now. He’s nailed the change from E to G. Going from there to C is nearly there. D is coming on,. He can now strum in perfect time: the other day, he played a cycle of three chords, and then looked up with an expression of complete fulfilment. True to the Denny method, he re-pens his fingernails on a daily basis. He’ll get there, I’m sure.

You can buy Maybe I’m Amazed here

Current listening! Two tracks: More Than Real by Richard Dawson, 2025; Lingering by Allegra Kriger, 2023

So, this is a good moment to try and articulate a deep fear of Reform UK-type politics, which is surely felt by plenty of people whose lives are (partly) defined by autism and neurodivergence.

Only last week, Farage jumped into the currently inescapable conversation about “overdiagnosis”, with his characteristic mixture of certainty and complete ignorance. He made the grimly familiar mistake – which was presumably not a mistake at all – of conflating issues to do with mental illness and those centred on Special Educational Needs, and claimed that questionable diagnoses were “creating a class of victims”. And then came the clincher: “So many of these diagnoses, for SEND before 18, for disability register [sic] after 18 – so many of these have been conducted on Zoom, with the family GP. I think that is a massive mistake.” Cue exactly what he wanted: a great explosion of outrage, and yet more headlines.

As most people reading this well know, even if some diagnoses happen via video platforms (lots of people have been in touch recently, pointing this out), the basics of what he said were howlingly incorrect. GPs don’t diagnose anything to do with SEND. No-one understood what “disability register” Farage was referring to, and he probably didn’t either. But his words were yet another instalment of a snowballing story about the new political right, here and around the world.

I wrote a piece for The Guardian the other week about Donald Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. and his poisonous belief that autism is a preventable disease, now enshrined in a plan to identify the “toxins” that cause it, and awful proposals for an American national register of autistic people – not to mention his insistence that autistic children will “never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.”

Last year, there was a brief flurry of fury about a pamphlet put out as part of Kemi Badenoch’s run for the leadership of the UK Conservative Party, which warned of neurodivergence leading to “a narrative built on fragility and medicalisation” instead of “building resilience”. It also claimed – to massed gasps of disbelief - that “being diagnosed as neurodiverse” was an easy route to “economic advantages and protections.”

Self-evidently, neurodiversity is now a central part of the so-called culture wars. The Kennedy position is both grimly modern and pathetically old-fashioned: it draws on the kind of conspiracy-theory nonsense about wholly imaginary causes and cures for autism that runs wild online, and fuses it with the idea that the clock should go back, leaving autism as a matter of shame and pity, and millions of autistic people as social outcasts. Badenoch and Farage, meanwhile, seem to think that (other?) neurodivergent people simply need to get with the “overdiagnosis” theory, and buck up.

What joins the two views together is plain enough. The New Right – and large swathes of the Old Right – loathe any notion of human complexity, and what it entails. That evidently defines its approach to neurodiversity. Across just about every issue, the politicians I’ve mentioned offer their supporters a belligerent kind of nostalgia, and a delusional belief that the past was better, partly because it was simpler. In that context, they think that our ever-more sophisticated understanding of human psychology is an affront to common sense that must be resisted. Handily enough, our over-stretched public services make their arguments financial as well as psychological. And we then end up with daily blasts of nonsense that amount to a cruel insistence: that neurodiversity must be denied, decried and put back in its box.

In Lincolnshire, there is an interesting local story about all this. People here may well wake up on Friday to the news that their new mayor is Andrea Jenkyns, who recently jumped from the Conservatives to Reform UK. In the wake of Farage’s pronouncements about SEND, she said that she and her new party leader "are not always going to agree on everything", and that her rather different opinions were those of someone with a child diagnosed with ADHD, and “somebody who's neurodiverse myself, and as a former MP who saw some of the very sad stories of children, how they've been left behind really.”

She also seems to want to attempt to an Elon Musk-style attack on Lincolnshire’s local public spending, which will be interesting to watch. But fair play to her: here, at least, is one honest difference which sets her apart from a lot of her political comrades. Whether it really counts for anything is another question: the New Right’s toxic view of millions of their fellow human beings feels like its getting grimmer by the day, and their seemingly unstoppable rise to power makes that all the more terrifying. That is not a word I use lightly, but it surely fits.

You can order my new book Maybe I’m Amazed here

I wake up to a news story that simply has to be written about. The Liberal Democrats – one of five political parties now jostling for success at next week’s English local elections – have announced a fascinating proposal: to ban the playing of music and videos (and, it seems, speakerphone calls) on public transport in England.

Much of the reporting of this idea has been arch and slightly mocking, partly because enforcing it would be absurdly complicated. Superficially, it might suggest the onward march of killjoys and party-poopers. And yes: the fact that I write about the kind of music that depends on loud volume but also think the proposal is worth exploring might look to some people like cosmic hypocrisy. When I posted about it this morning on BlueSky, I received slightly damning replies that proposed - ha ha - also banning sneezing, coughing, breathing too loudly, and “taking too long to get on and off”.

But here’s the thing: this is an idea reflected in the actual laws and rules that operate in other countries (The Guardian reports that a man was recently fined €200 after making a phone call on loudspeaker in a quiet area of Nantes station in France), and it also goes to the heart of autism awareness and overlooked aspects of neurodivergence. I mention some of these in my new book: what some people call Sound Sensitivity is a psychological feature I have in common with my autistic son James, so I know exactly what it means… and why the 21st century cacophony of noise that often erupts on trains and buses can be very bad news indeed.

Self-evidently, this is one big part of the sensory aspects of neurodivergence. Here’s the absolute beginners’ version, which took five seconds to find via Google: “Sound sensitivity — also known as hyperacusis — is common in autistic people. Some noises might make you uncomfortable, especially loud or shrill noises, but many people are sensitive to quieter sounds, too…. These noises cause unwanted intrusions that the person can’t ignore… Hyperacusis can make it difficult to go out in public as you can’t always predict what sounds you will encounter.”

In James’s case, these issues are mostly manageable (we just get away from the source of the noise, be it a hand-dryer, railway-station tannoy, leaf-blower or whatever). But on public transport, that usually isn’t possible – and if you have the kind of cognitive make-up that leads to Hyperacusis, that can be a big problem. Personally, I can just about cope, but it can still ruin journeys, thanks to a mixture of the noise itself, and the nagging bafflement that comes with it. Why do people now make speakerphone calls when they could just as easily take the old-school option of holding the phone to their ear? What kind of blithe unawareness enables the loud watching of two-hour films in a packed carriage, with not even a flicker of unease? Etc, etc.

Nearly ten years ago, I wrote a big feature for The Guardian based on conversations with three people who had got their autism diagnoses as adults. Without any prompting, everyday extraneous noise was one of the things we discussed. “When the sensory stuff is happening, it’s like you’re being Tasered,” said one of my interviewees, who mentioned people flicking train tickets, or jangling their coins, but could just as easily have been referring to speakerphone conversations or TikTok videos played at ear-blasting volume. “It’s not just, ‘That’s annoying.’ It’s, ‘That’s unbearable.’ I have said, ‘I’m really sorry, but can you stop doing that?’ But people don’t.”

They really don’t. One of the most interesting things about the Lib Dem announcement is that it goes to the heart of a very British (English?) reluctance to do anything about all this: polling reported today says that 54% of people would not feel comfortable asking someone to turn down music on public transport, rising to 63% among women. There is, in fact, a modern convention whereby politely asking someone not to fill the carriage with their trebly din is socially off-limits, and the acceptable response is to enliven the journey by exchanging eye-rolls and emitting loud sighs. This, I think, reflects a common belief that actually objecting to unwanted noise is somehow priggish and petty. But it isn’t. Certainly not if you’re autistic.

Today’s proposal centres on fines of up to £1,000, but God knows how that would work. There is, however, a lot to be said for what the BBC’s report calls “a national publicity campaign, including posters on train platforms and at bus stops.” Put another way, I don’t this is really about incipient authoritarianism and the courts filling up with hapless people who just wanted to talk to their mum or watch an Ed Sheeran video. I hope it sparks a conversation about social norms, the importance of mutual understanding – and, if at all possible, sensory issues that millions of us experience.

The Lib Dems are always somewhat clunky operators, so it’s no great surprise that autism and neurodivergence go unmentioned in the proposal’s PR blitz. Which only goes to prove a familiar point: that when it comes to really understanding so many of our fellow human beings, we have light years to go.

Order my new book Maybe I’m Amazed here

Tour date! I’m at the Derby book festival on Wednesday May 28th. Tickets here

Current listening: the complete, exhaustive Maybe I’m Amazed playlist, put together by Steven Lindsay, plus the self-titled Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, which is still unfolding, and is just great

Anyway…

As many music addicts well know, today is Record Store Day, that annual jamboree of thrillingly unnecessary consumerism that may have its downsides (e.g eBay Vampires who only blink into the light on this one date), but that survives as a symbol of the renaissance of vinyl, and an opportunity to get excited about sometimes absurdly arcane objects: I’ll be down at my local shop in due course, looking for a 1,000-edition “etched” record by the ‘80s one-offs Boys Wonder.

Anyway. Record shops are a small but significant subtext in Maybe I’m Amazed. This is partly because, unlike older people like me, my son James is part of a generation that experienced digital and analogue music in that order: iTunes and Spotify ignited his fascination, and then the rebirth of record stores miraculously brought everything into the real world. For us, part of the story also involved the fact that by some strange miracle, our hometown had a thriving record store long before they came back into fashion: Raves From The Grave in Frome (more of which below), which masterfully walked the line between being a Mom’n’Pop shop where people came to buy DVDs of Heartbeat, and a vinyl-specialist emporium beloved of Heads and collectors.

Me and James go there – and to other shops – at least twice a week. His last buys, earlier this week, were pre-loved copies of Captain Beefheart’s The Spotlight Kid and Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. So, in honour of RSD, these are the shops where several parts of the Maybe I’m Amazed story - and one or two other tales – happened, with apologies for West Country bias…

Raves From The Grave, Frome
We moved to Somerset in 2009, and this amazing business was already here, in more cramped premises than its current home. If you’ve read Maybe I’m Amazed, you’ll know that a magically serendipitous role in the story goes to the former Mott The Hoople chief Ian Hunter, and so it proved once again: the first thing I bought from Raves was a CD of his Best Of collection Once Bitten Twice Shy, which was duly loaded into iTunes; the title track then became one of James’s formative musical obsessions, and was signed by Hunter when we met him, in gold pen.
Having moved from a setting that made it feel like a surreal cave, the shop now operates across two floors. It’s a completely magical place, whose upstairs second-hand racks are a particular source of fascination and joy: true to form, among James’s most recent buys were original LP copies of Hunter’s albums You’re Never Alone With A Schizophrenic and All Of The Good Ones Are Taken. Just to confirm Hunter’s supernatural kind of happenstance, Richard, the owner, is another of his disciples.

Piccadilly Records, Manchester
A monarchical shop, so pre-eminent that it sometimes brings artists to national attention (e.g Jane Weaver). It has a very long history: old people from the North West may recall the ticket outlet under its former setting on Piccadilly Plaza (I bought my tickets for The Smiths’ 1986 show at Salford University there, and then checked my wallet every 30 seconds on the way home, in deep fear that I might have somehow mislaid them). The book recalls James’s habit of taking records from racks and then loudly reciting their stories, via one key example: “That’s The Clash’s sophomore album Give ’Em Enough Rope, released in November 1978 on CBS records.” Much to the staff’s amazement, that happened here, when he was 10. Obviously, we then bought it.

Drift, Totnes
Probably the best example of how to create the perfect modern record store: welcoming, expert, beautifully designed and furnished, and full of a sense that it’s more than a shop - witness Sea Change, the weekend festival that was last staged in 2023. On our last visit, James bought Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity; I picked Lucy Dacus’s Historian. He won, I think.

Friendly Records, Bristol
In the quintessentially Bristolian neighbourhood of Bedminster. Go on a Saturday afternoon, when it tends to be full of people, and gives off the feeling of somewhere you go not just to buy stuff, but hang out, in the hope of revelations and tips. Friendly mostly sells vintage records that are lovingly racked, annotated and packaged, but it also turns its customers on to new things: if it wasn’t for owner Tom, for example, I wouldn’t know about Portishead founder Geoff Barrow’s brilliant project Beak>. Also, their self-branded T-shirts are brilliant.

Rough Trade East, London, and Rough Trade, Bristol
Another moment from the book: “I only play James the title track of Clear Spot by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band once. Its mixture of discordant guitar, growling vocals and knock-kneed drumming, I suspect, might strike him as curious and funny, like a big, monster-centred production number from Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. But it has pretty much the reverse effect: within a few seconds, his face is suddenly filled with an expression of absolute panic, he screams in protest, and I instantly know I have to to turn it off and never put it on again.” I can now happily report that James now really likes Clear Spot - not just the title track, but such songs as My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains, Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles, and Low Yo Yo Stuff. The breach was healed on Spotify, and he then used his Christmas money to buy Clear Spot from Rough Trade East, which is a spellbinding space – as is the Bristol branch, where James was recently thrilled to find - and, really, the fringes of Hipster Capitalism are really quite something – a Joe Strummer action figure. A Joe Strummer action figure.

Vinyl Van, Dorchester and Sound Knowledge, Marlborough
Two different stories that shine light on record shops’ rebirth. Vinyl Van is one of those places that now enlivens trips around many English towns: a new(ish) record shop full of a mixture of new and used vinyl, which is so sumptuous and full of love and expertise that you feel obliged to buy something. Sound Knowledge, meanwhile, tells another story. In 2003, the Observer commissioned me to write a eulogy for the Record Store, which – thanks to Napster, and the fashionable idea that music was now expected to be free – seemed to be inexorably on its way out. I wrote about this shop because it had always seemed to boldly defy the odds. Its owner, Roger, rhapsodised about the records he was recommending to his customers: “Joe Strummer's posthumously released Streetcore, Gillian Welch's Soul Journey and an album by an obscure French ambient enterprise called Zorg.”
I also interviewed that human byword for record shops Nick Hornby. “There are a lot of people who will never pay for music ever again,” he told me. “Why would you?”
James was three years away from being born at that point, and I would imagine he won’t be the only person of his age dutifully joining today’s queues, carefully flicking through the racks, and experiencing that quiet and deep euphoria that record-shopping always delivers.

Current listening!
Album: Live At Carnegie Hall by Bill Withers, 1973 (from Rough Trade, Bristol)
Track: Is Metal by Jane Weaver, 2024 (she played Bath Komedia on Wednesday, and was brilliant)

Briefly, a flavour of some of that…

Jude Rogers’s review in the Observer… Tim Clare’s piece in The Guardian … Will Hodgkinson writes in The Times…. and an abridged version of the book that’s (it amazes me to say) Radio 4’s Book Of The Week.

You can order Maybe I’m Amazed here.

Here’s a definitive playlist to go with the book.

Anyway. I want to big up another book this week.

Pamela Heaton is Emerita Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths University Of London, and an amazing authority and source of knowledge about music and autism. I interviewed her – twice – for Maybe I’m Amazed: her trailblazing work on autism and pitch skills, how music securely carries emotion to many autistic people and much more is cited in two of the key chapters. She’s now published a book titled The Pyschology of Autism and Music (subtitled ‘Hearing, Feeling, Thinking, Doing’), which is authoritative and fascinating, and full of explanations and theories that illuminate my son James’s musicality.

I’m still making my way through it, but one thing screamed out to be written about straight away. More knowledgeable readers will doubtless be aware of the concept of Flow pioneered by the Hungarian-American pyschologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi - in which, to quote Professor Heaton, ‘a person’s total immersion in activity engenders feelings of absorption, eneregy and enjoyment.’

As she explains, Flow encompasses nine dimensions – among them, ‘an equal balance between challenges and skill levels’, ‘a clear sense of purpose and an awareness of what will happen next’, ‘a strong sense of personal control’, and ‘a loss of self-consciousness and a distorted sense of time.’

The idea’s proponents later proposed an ‘autotelic’ personality type (the word refers to activities that have an end in themselves), common to people who are able to achieve ‘a rewarding balance between the “play” of challenge-finding, and the “work” of skill-building.’ Some of us, in other words, seek out ways of doing and being that hold play and work in perfect balance, and they can glide through activities and pastimes while also subtly pushing themselves into fresh territory.

Which brings us to a big point. ‘Autobiographical accounts written by autistic adults,’ writes Professor Heaton, ‘show that experiences of Flow are a pervasive aspect of everyday life.’ She refers to one piece of academic work that describes ‘how this may be mischaracterised as a '“tuning out” of the social world, rather than a deep immersion in activities that capture interests and trigger pleasurable experiences of flow.’ The same text mentions ‘clear goals’, ‘immediate feedback’, ‘the fusing of action and awareness’, and ‘reduced anxiety around failure and the sense of control and achievement, bringing intrinsic satisfaction.’

Yes, yes, yes.

As soon as I read this, I was instantly aware that my autistic son James experiences Flow States on a daily - sometimes hourly - basis. They happen when he creates intricate PowerPoint and Keynote presentations that involve hours of research about particular subjects - to take a few examples at random,: the countries of the UK, winter, pirates, the equipment used by The Strokes – and meticulous design. I think Flow describes his most transcendent experiences of hiking and mountaineering. And it also applies to feats of musical exploration that can last for hours: the last big one happened when James sat at a piano and worked out every chord triad, for both the white and black notes. In all these things, Flow’s balance of the familiar and challenging is present and correct; so is the mixture of play and work.

The other loud bells all this rang were to do with some of the – and I choose my words carefully here – apparently/possibly neurodivergent musicians I mention in my book, and the everyday feats they immersed themselves in: John Coltrane practising the saxophone for endless hours; Nick Drake working out his vocal and guitar parts to a point of perfection; the scores of non-famous musicians who are well acquainted with the quiet pleasures of what some people call ‘woodshedding’: solitudinously working on whatever you find yourself obsessed with, to the exclusion of everything else. To paraphrase Professor Heaton, this looks like a ‘tuning out’ of the social world – but it’s actually an immersion in activities that trigger pleasurable experiences of Flow.

She links it with the kind of intense obsession that autism specialists call ‘Monotropism’, and it feels like they are almost terms for the same thing. I need to read more, but I already know this much: that a whole universe of music owes existence to Flow states, and they are part of 1)the hidden story of neurodivergence and creativity, and 2)How my son interacts with the world.

In something of a Flow state of my own, I’ll read on. More soon.

Maybe I’m Amazed on tour!
Waterstones in central Manchester with Dave Haslam on Wednesday April 16th
The Elysium Gallery in Swansea with Jude Rogers on Tuesday April 22nd
The Sheffield Festival of Debate with Melissa Simmonds on Thursday April 24th
Derby book festival on Wednesday May 28th (on sale soon). More dates to be announced.

Current listening: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory album… bought from Spillers in Cardiff