Schools and parents are being pushed towards ADHD and autism diagnoses because they have become the "currency" of an overwhelmed education system, an education expert has warned.
Dave Clements, author of The Crisis in the Classroom, said Britain is increasingly "medicalising childhood", with diagnoses becoming the gateway to support and funding instead of tackling the underlying reasons why children are struggling.
'We can't go on like this'
"We can't go on like this," he warned, arguing Britain cannot "diagnose its way out" of the crisis and that support should be based on children's needs rather than an ever-growing list of labels.
Speaking on the Care Visions Talks podcast, by Care Visions children and residential home company, released next week, the former school governor and father of a son diagnosed with autism and ADHD said the system is leaving children with the most complex needs competing for scarce resources. At the same time growing numbers of youngsters are being given labels that "isn't necessarily helping them."
Record exclusions and surging special needs
His warning comes as ministers launch an independent review into whether soaring diagnoses reflect genuine unmet need or a wider trend towards the medicalisation of childhood.
It also comes after Department for Education figures published this week revealed a record number of children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) - for those with the most complex needs - were permanently excluded from school last year despite an overall fall in exclusions.
The figures show permanent exclusions among pupils with EHCPs more than tripled from 347 in 2014/15 to 1,198 in 2024/25, while suspensions rocketed from 33,544 to 116,188 over the same period.
Meanwhile, special educational needs have surged across England. More than one in five children - 1.86 million pupils - are now identified as having special educational needs, up from around one in six a decade ago. The number of children with EHCPs, which guarantee additional support, has almost tripled from 240,183 in 2015 to 718,838 today.
"If one in five children has special educational needs, are they still special?" Mr Clements asked.
Labels becoming a source of school 'currency'
Rather than questioning the existence of ADHD or autism, Mr Clements believes Britain has increasingly turned to medical diagnoses to explain a much wider range of childhood struggles.
Speaking on the Care Visions podcast, run by children’s care organisation Care Visions, he said: "We want to explain away children's problems by medicalising them. I don't think that's helpful for most children. I think for most children, there are likely to be other explanations."
He stressed that while many children have genuine neurodevelopmental conditions and need specialist support, others are being wrongly diagnosed.
"We've got a large group of children who are still not getting the support they require... and then there are other children who are being diagnosed with conditions, but it isn't necessarily helping them."
He believes the explosion in diagnoses has been fuelled by a system that ties support to formal labels.
Schools receive extra resources for children with EHCPs, while parents often see diagnosis as the only realistic route to getting help.
Mr Clements argues that is why ADHD and autism diagnoses have become the education system's "currency".
"If a school has four or five children whose needs are complex enough... you may well be able to afford a teaching assistant. I think schools who are struggling in terms of resources will go for that... Parents do the same because they think it might help them," he said.
The result, he argues, is that children with the greatest needs are forced to compete with a rapidly growing number of others entering the system.
"We've got the system being overwhelmed by questionable needs, and then you've got genuine, really difficult needs that need to be addressed."
Root causes of childhood struggles
Mr Clements believes many of today's classroom struggles are rooted not in illness but in profound changes to childhood itself.
He says anxiety, trauma, family breakdown, poor sleep, excessive screen use and changing social environments are too often viewed through a medical lens.
"I try not to dismiss some of the issues that children and families face. Often these are real needs, but naming them doesn't necessarily help. You need to understand why those needs emerged in the first place."
He also questioned the growing influence of what he sees as the "neurodiversity movement". Although he supports reducing stigma around neurological differences, he believes it has drifted far beyond its original purpose.
"It's become institutionalised. It's become medicalised," he said.
He warned schools are increasingly being expected to tailor teaching around an ever-growing number of individual diagnoses.
"It becomes much more about adapting their teaching to each individual child and each individual child's needs, which inevitably becomes very difficult."
Instead of asking, "What condition does this child have?", Mr Clements believes Britain should spend more time asking, "Why is this child struggling?"
He argues children today spend less time outdoors, enjoy less independence and face pressures previous generations never experienced.
"I don't think children themselves have changed particularly," he said. "I think we've put them in a very difficult situation. It's an adult problem. We've created an environment where those risks are no longer open to them."
Care Visions Talks podcast will be released on all major platforms on Wednesday 29th July.
