School leaders are navigating a difficult tension. Every day, they are asked to provide safe, orderly and predictable environments, maintain high expectations, and meet increasingly complex SEND needs. Consistency matters, providing vital security for many pupils, but the balancing act between consistency and reasonable adjustment is a delicate one. Against this pressured backdrop, the Department for Education’s new SEND teacher-training programme is a welcome and necessary intervention. Equipping classroom staff with practical inclusive techniques, such as reducing unnecessary environmental noise, chunking instructions and using visual supports, provides essential scaffolding for pupils who need it. But training in technique can only take us so far. The more difficult question is whether the systems surrounding those strategies recognise neurodivergent pupils as successful on their own terms or continue to judge participation against relatively narrow behavioural norms. Invisible benchmark In many classrooms, we routinely interpret observable behaviour as evidence of internal qualities. A child who sits still, maintains eye contact and complies immediately may often be read as engaged, respectful, resilient and “ready to learn”. The neurotypical ideal becomes an invisible benchmark for the successful pupil. These judgments are not trivial. They shape who is praised, who is sanctioned, who is seen as trying and who is seen as not. Once compliance becomes shorthand for engagement or character, a pupil can be doing everything possible to cope with school and still be read as failing at it. For neurodivergent children, that creates an obvious problem. Movement, avoidance, withdrawal, delayed compliance or dysregulation may be responses to overload, anxiety, uncertainty or an inaccessible environment. Yet those behaviours can be interpreted not as difference or distress, but as attitude, disrespect, laziness or lack of resilience. This is where the inclusion illusion can take root. Inclusive adjustments may make the immediate learning environment more accessible, but their impact is limited if the assumptions surrounding them remain unchanged. Default measure A school may recognise the need for movement, flexibility or access to quieter spaces while its wider systems still privilege sitting still, remaining in the classroom and responding immediately to adult direction. None of those expectations is inherently unreasonable. The problem arises when they become the default measure of whether a pupil is engaged, trying or succeeding. If our ultimate measure of successful inclusion is that pupils with SEND become easier to manage – that we have successfully scaffolded them into behaving more like their peers – then we risk confusing inclusion with assimilation. None of this is straightforward for school leaders. The difficulty arises when consistency becomes synonymous with uniformity, and reasonable adjustment is treated as a departure from expectations rather than part of them. That is why the new training should prompt leaders not simply to ask whether staff know more SEND strategies, but whether the systems surrounding those strategies allow them to work. Behaviour policy scrutiny Behaviour policies deserve scrutiny. Even well-intentioned policies can disadvantage pupils when success is defined too narrowly. Leaders can ask whether their systems allow for context, relational safety and reasonable adjustment, or whether the same behavioural response is expected from every child regardless of need. Reward systems need the same attention. If schools routinely reward sitting still, silent listening, immediate task initiation, first-time compliance or orderly transitions, they may inadvertently be rewarding neurotypical performance rather than effort, learning or character. Pupils who cannot consistently display those behaviours can be positioned as less successful even when they are working just as hard, if not sometimes harder, to participate. Educational environment Finally, staff responses to dysregulation need to move beyond automatic disciplinary interpretation. Training in practical strategies is useful, but it must sit alongside an approach that treats dysregulation first as information. What unmet need, inaccessible demand, skill gap or environmental barrier might be contributing to the behaviour? That does not mean abandoning boundaries, accountability or repair. It means refusing to assume that the meaning of behaviour is self-evident. The DfE’s new training provides useful tools for inclusive practice, but schools cannot carry this burden alone. If this investment genuinely is to change neurodivergent pupils’ daily experience, the DfE must ensure that its behaviour guidance, funding decisions and wider expectations support the inclusive practice it is asking schools to deliver. True inclusion is not about scaffolding a neurodivergent child into behaving exactly like a neurotypical one. It is about building an educational environment where they do not have to.