Support for bright Thinkers and SEND
- May 26
- 2 min read
When I was 11 I stopped speaking. I did not know it at the time, but what happened to me is known as selective mutism. Because it only happened at school, my darling immigrant parents probably didn't even know it was happening. People would just say I was "shy." There is no shyness in the inability to make a sound. We had immigrated to the USA when I was 11. That upheaval, a new country, a new language, a new everything, is what caused the mutism. A wise school counsellor, a little old lady as I remember her, saved me. She had met me before the mutism took hold, and she had seen me sit and read through piles of books in Spanish, because I could not yet engage with school in English. She fought for me to be placed in honours classes. I remember a teacher being dismayed at finding this out. How could this girl who could not even speak go to honours English? She wanted me held back. The counsellor held firm. She looked past what I couldn't do and saw what I could. That decision changed the course of my life.
I am now an educator myself. And I see versions of this story so often. I work with some phenomenal children – children who teach themselves A-level physics, but who struggle to tie their shoes. Who can debate me in philosophy and compare youth subcultures eloquently, but who struggle to speak with peers. The child who is brilliant but cannot show it in the ways school demands. The one who is labelled "low ability" because their anxiety is louder than their intellect in that room, on that day. The one whose silence, or whose behaviour, or whose difference, is read as a ceiling, when it is nothing of the sort.
There is a particular kind of invisibility that comes not from being overlooked, but from being misread. Children who are intellectually gifted and living with a learning difference, disability, or neurodivergence, inhabit this paradox daily. They are often noticed, but seldom truly seen. They may be labelled as lazy, disruptive, emotionally immature, or simply puzzling. What they are rarely labelled as, until someone pays very close attention, is what they actually are: exceptionally bright people navigating a world that wasn't designed with them in mind.
In the United Kingdom, a long-overdue reckoning with special educational needs provision is underway. Following years of documented failures in the SEND system, underfunding, interminable wait times for Education, Health and Care Plans, and a persistent gap between policy and practice, the government's SEND and Alternatives to Exclusion framework and ongoing reform process represent a significant opportunity. But reform, however well-intentioned, risks repeating old errors if it does not grapple seriously with the needs of its most complex learners. Twice-exceptional children are among the most likely to fall through the cracks, and the most likely to be harmed by systems that can only hold one truth about them at a time.
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