Everybody noticed

There is a particular kind of meeting I have sat in on both sides of the table. The child's name is at the top of the page. Around the room, one by one, the adults describe what they have seen. The class teacher has noticed he stops writing after about four minutes. The SNA has noticed he is fine until the corridor. The learning support teacher has noticed he will read aloud to her and not to anyone else. The parent has noticed that he has stopped eating breakfast on Tuesdays, and has worked out, because she is his mother and she has been doing this for nine years, that Tuesday is the day the timetable changes room three times.

Everybody noticed.

The meeting ends. Somebody writes it up. And then nothing happens, not because anybody is careless or unkind, but because the noticing was the whole of what the system asked for. There was no next line on the form that said: and this person, by this date, will do this.

I read a piece this week by an edtech founder called Alicia Kacharia, arguing — against her own industry's sales pitch — that AI tutoring will do the most for the students who need it least. Her reasoning is that content was never what was scarce. What decides whether a child learns, she says, is stability, motivation, and accountability: an adult who expects something and checks. Her line was this. AI should do the noticing. A person should do the following up.

I have not been able to put it down since.

The cheap half and the expensive half

We are about to get extremely good at noticing. That is genuinely what this technology is for, and I do not say that grudgingly — I build with these tools and I think some of what they can do for access is real. A system that flags the child who has stopped submitting work, or reads back a pattern in attendance that no single teacher could see, is doing something worth doing.

But noticing is the cheap half. It has always been the cheap half. Ask any parent of an autistic child which part was hard: the seeing, or the getting someone to act on what you saw. Nobody I know has ever come out of a school or a clinic saying the problem is they didn't notice. They come out saying they were listened to, warmly and at length, by someone who then had nowhere to send it.

So when a tool promises to do more noticing, the honest design question is not whether it is accurate. It is: who is expected to be listening at the other end? If the answer is nobody in particular, we have built an alerting system with no responder — and the children it alerts about are precisely the ones already well used to being noticed, and then not followed up.

The Irish evidence says the same thing in a different accent

This morning two researchers, Caoimhe Dempsey of UCC and Selina McCoy of the ESRI, wrote about what the new Deis Plus programme ought to prioritise. Their answer was relationships — between school and family, between teacher and child. “Building authentic social connections between the school and the wider community is not a soft addition to education,” they wrote, “it is the very foundation upon which academic equity is built.”

That sentence deserves to be read as engineering rather than sentiment. What they are describing is not niceness. It is the mechanism by which noticing turns into following up. A teacher who knows a family can ring them. A parent who knows a teacher will answer the phone. That is infrastructure. It can be built into a school day, and it can be squeezed out of one, and which of those happens is a decision somebody makes about timetables, rooms, caseloads and cover.

And yesterday, outside Leinster House, a mother named Mandy Clarke said something that belongs in the same paragraph as all of this. Her eleven-year-old daughter is autistic and is self-injuring. “We knock at every door,” she said, “there is nobody opening the door to us.”

Not a missing document. A missing door.

What I would ask for instead

I am not arguing for less noticing. I am arguing that we have spent twenty years building ever better instruments for observing children, and almost nothing on the question of whose job it is to respond. The assessment report, the screening tool, the tracker, the dashboard, and now the model — all of it is apparatus for the first half of a two-part sentence that we keep leaving unfinished.

The universal design version of this is not complicated. When you design a thing, you design the response into it, not the appeals process. Before the school buys the tool, ask who acts on its output and what has been taken off that person's plate to make room. Before the meeting ends, write the second line. Before the strategy is written, name the duty-holder.

And I want to say clearly that none of this is a criticism of the adults in the room. Teachers are noticing constantly, in conditions that were not designed for the range of children now in front of them. Parents are noticing first and being told to wait. Siblings are noticing, and mostly saying nothing about it. The child is noticing too — noticing that he is being observed very carefully by a great many people, and that nothing about Tuesday has changed.

That last one is the lesson he actually learns, and it is not the one on the plan.

Change the environment, not the child. In this case, the environment is the second half of the sentence.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.