When “he’s not trying” is the wrong story

Yesterday's Irish Times carried an instalment in a short series on school refusal — parents, mostly, describing what it actually looks like when a child cannot get into a classroom. A mother in Offaly whose autistic son has now been out of school for almost three years: "I never imagined that getting my child an education could become such a battle." A parent in Tipperary: "My son wants to go to school but can't. Everything in his body, his nervous system, is shocked." And the line that's stayed with me since I read it: "He isn't lazy. He isn't badly behaved. He is a frightened child."

I want to sit with that last one, because I think it's the whole argument in one sentence.

For as long as I've been doing this work — as a teacher, then as a parent, now running Autism & Me — I've watched families get handed a very narrow menu of explanations when their child can't manage school. Is it the parenting? Is it the child being difficult? Is it a "phase"? Rarely, in my experience, does anyone ask the question that actually explains most of what's happening: is the environment doing this to the child?

That's not a rhetorical flourish. A child who vomits before the school run, who panics on the walk to the gate, who goes rigid at the classroom door — that's a nervous system responding to a genuine threat signal. It might be noise. It might be unpredictability. It might be the sheer cognitive cost of masking difference all day in a room built around one dominant way of learning, moving, and communicating. Whatever the specific trigger, the body isn't lying, and it isn't being difficult on purpose. It's telling the truth about a poor fit between a child and an environment that was never designed with that child in mind.

This is where I keep coming back to Universal Design for Learning, because UDL isn't a "nice to have" add-on for a handful of pupils — it's a different starting premise. Instead of building one route through the curriculum and then retrofitting accommodations for whoever falls off it, UDL asks: what if we designed multiple ways in from the start? Multiple ways to engage, multiple ways to take in information, multiple ways to show what you know. Built that way, a classroom stops sorting children into "coping" and "not coping" — because it was never built around only one way of coping.

I want to be careful here, because it would be very easy to write this as a piece that blames someone — teachers for not doing enough, the Department for moving too slowly, parents for pushing too hard or not hard enough. I don't think that's honest, and it's not what I see when I talk to the people actually living this. Teachers are trying to meet enormously diverse needs in packed classrooms with a curriculum that hasn't caught up. Parents are exhausted, and often isolated, and second-guessing themselves constantly. Siblings are absorbing a version of family stress that rarely gets a mention in any of these articles. And the child at the centre of it is doing the hardest thing of all: existing inside a system that keeps interpreting their distress as a character flaw.

None of that is any one person's failure. It's the predictable result of a system that still treats inclusion as a logistics problem — get the child physically into the building — rather than a design problem. Ireland's education system has moved a long way from where it was a generation ago, and that matters and deserves to be said plainly. But what we have now is, in a lot of respects, a softened version of the same underlying model: still built around one pace, one route, one definition of a "good" student, with support bolted on around the edges for whoever doesn't fit. Presence in the room was never the same thing as being included in it.

What would it look like to actually change the starting premise, rather than the amount of scaffolding around it? That's the question I keep asking, in classrooms and in policy rooms and in this small organisation. I don't think there's a single fix. But I do think the families in yesterday's article deserve more than sympathy in the comments section — they deserve a system that stops asking them to be the ones who bend.

— Elaine Walsh, founder, Autism & Me

Source: "'He would cry the whole way to school': Parents share experiences of classroom anxiety," The Irish Times, 8 September 2026. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/09/08/he-would-cry-the-whole-way-to-school-parents-share-experiences-of-classroom-anxiety/