LET’S TORK AbAwT SPELLING

It’s just teenage hormones or anxiety…

Going down this route can lead to years of misdiagnosis. Girls and women with ADHD can have di culties regulating their emotions, a hard time socially and low selfesteem, after years of being told “try harder”, but this pressure to fi t in comes at a cost. Girls can be more socially capable, as they often mirror, copy or imitate the skills of peers, thus making them harder to spot, but meltdown and exhaustion can quickly follow. Moreover, undiagnosed ADHD can cause anxiety, depression, conduct disorder, substance abuse, and sleep problems. So, check with your SENCO before chalking it up to “Teenagers”.

But they’re fi ne in my class…

What we’re missing here is the emphasis on my class. In other words, in classes that give us that wonderful dopamine hit (that means we’re interested) we can be fi ne, whilst in other settings… not so much. That my friends, is the result of something called hyperfocus. It’s our superpower! Hyperfocus is the ability to zero intensely on an exciting project or activity for hours at a time. I personally love it. Unfortunately, most of us with ADHD struggle to direct this… and often forget to eat during such periods as well.

People with ADHD have low levels of dopamine in the brain’s frontal lobes and this makes it harder for us to change tasks, especially when enjoying the current task more than a suggested new one. Hyperfocus is our way of boosting our dopamine levels from the enjoyment we get from something that really interests us. So, I might do brilliantly in for example, English Literature when reading Frankenstein, but fail completely in History if it’s not a topic I like. I can’t pick and choose. It’s not that I don’t have attention, I just can’t regulate where that attention goes.

References:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-44956540

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS22150366(17)30049-4/fulltext

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/attention-defi cit-hyperactivity-disorderadhd/symptoms/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC6745333/#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20 around,issues%20with%20such%20studies%20and https://dyslexiaida.org/attention-defi cithyperactivity-disorder-adhdand-dyslexia/

https://www.adhdfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ Teaching-and-Managing-Students_FINAL.pdf

https://adhdfoundation.org.uk/

https://www.additudemag.com/

https://www.additudemag.com/simone-biles-adhd-olympicgymnast-publicly-addresses-condition/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dalearcher/2014/05/14/adhd-theentrepreneurs-superpower/?sh=6f7da8f259e9

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/leonardo-da-vinci-adhd-scli-intl/ index.html

https://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_ of_minds/transcript?language=en

It comes with friends…

When I was diagnosed, the shock came not from the ADHD being confi rmed. After a while of researching for teaching my pupils, I had long suspected I was di erent. But the results from my autism diagnosis. I could not be dyslexic, have ADHD and have autism? Well, actually, yes.

Studies have shown 60%–100% of children with ADHD also exhibit one or more comorbid disorders. Estimates of up to 30 per cent of those diagnosed with dyslexia also have ADHD and up to 42% with ADS. So, being told I was highly likely to be autistic too means I am now undergoing the whole process of getting diagnosed again, just this time for ASD. This happens quite commonly apparently.

Supporting ADHD pupils

Suppose you’re trying to help a student with ADHD. There are many brilliant resources to help, including some fantastic resources from the wonderful ADHD Foundation https:// adhdfoundation.org.uk/, which we all should be reading and was incredibly helpful in my diagnosis. The attitude magazine is brilliant in understanding the entire spectrum of symptoms and challenges we face https://www. additudemag.com/. Both have been a godsend, so hopefully you will have a look at them.

Getting yourself checked out…

What happens when you DO have a look at the resources above and think… “That sounds like me”? Well… please speak to your GP and take the short diagnostic criteria test for ADHD. Life is much easier with a confi rmed diagnosis if you have ADHD. You may not. But if you do, don’t be frightened of telling your school. Mine was very supportive, and we need more teachers and role models for our young people. The phrase “I have ADHD too” has never been more powerful.

Last, but absolutely not least… ADHD role models

Pupils and teachers with ADHD can often feel that ‘the world out there is not like me’ and so struggle to relate to traditional role models. Thankfully, there are a lot of neurodiverse people out there, some of whom have publicly spoken about their experiences, from Simone Biles, Dave Grohl to Sir Richard Branson.

You see, although we tend often to focus on the di culties of ADHD, there can be a real positives too and Forbes described ADHD as the entrepreneurs’ superpower. ADHDers (as they’re sometimes known) see the world and its potential entirely di erently to neurotypical people and this can lead to unique perspectives.

It’s been suggested for example that Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci both had classic ADHD, although we’ll never know for sure…

As the world-leading animal behaviourist and autistic Temple Grandin says, “The world needs all kinds of minds”. As tricky as it is negotiating through a neurotypical world, I wouldn’t trade my neurodivergent brain. I experience and see the world di erently from my neurotypical counterparts, and for me, whilst this has sometimes meant hardship, it has, with support also brought success.

I wouldn’t trade my ADHD for anything.

“Hyperfocus is the ability to zero intensely on an exciting project or activity for hours at a time. I personally love it. Unfortunately, most of us with ADHD struggle to direct this”

VIEW FROM THE MIDDLE

The three-tier school system is often overlooked by policy-makers and poorly understood by those who haven’t worked in them. Nick Wood explains what can be learnt from the way middle schools operate.

By Nick Wood

School-based education discourse often leads to observation of the di erences between primary and secondary schooling. Policy-making across the school sector inevitably ends up favouring one or the other, as the reason for the policy is often to address an issue more prominent in that particular part of the sector.

As a minority part of the school sector, middle schools are frequently overlooked: in general discourse; in the design of data-gathering activities which are supposed to shed light on macro problems; in policy-making; and in what they might o er in terms of a perspective on what constitutes good practice in schools, and also what doesn’t.

There are now just over 100 middle schools in England, the majority of which have academised. The current number is relatively stable. The minority status of middle schools is the result of a process started in the 1980s to rationalise the education system to a consistent primary / secondary model. One might presume this is because middle schools are less e ective, however there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Most of these schools are part of a three-tier local system, with pupils moving from fi rst school to middle school at the start of Year 5, and from middle school to upper / high school at the start of Year 9. It’s a model that doesn’t sit neatly with our accountability system. But it wasn’t supposed to. It was designed with child development in mind.

A common argument against the three-tier system is the e ect often referred to as “transition dip”. Moving schools puts cognitive load under pressure as in the fi rst half-term of a new setting, pupils’ attention to subject learning is hampered by the individual need to learn the geography, social mores and routines of the new setting: something we all do in a new environment to meet the needs of personal safety and security. This leads to an apparent dip in academic performance in the early part of the child’s career in a new school. Surely a system with two transitions leads to more dips in performance, which is to the detriment of pupil outcomes?

Yet there is evidence to suggest this is not true. My hypothesis is that pupils, having experienced one successful transfer, build a resilience to moving environments. The second transfer gives feedback that moving institutions is not a barrier to be feared, and this is supported by social proof of one’s peers. Resilience to change is one of the outcomes of education that most people would agree is a good thing; yet is not measured or valued by our accountability system. Imagine the di erence at a personal level – a child moving from a typical one or two form entry primary of between 200 and 300 children to a large secondary of 1500 children has to deal with this change at the same time as most are dealing with all the anxiety and cognitive change that puberty can throw at them. The same child in a three-tier system moved schools to a 400 – 600 environment before this started, has had more specialist teaching and access to specialist learning environments across the curriculum from an earlier age, has been given the responsibility of organising themselves to go from room to room in this smaller, more nurturing environment, with sta that can specialise in the needs of children of this age both emotionally and academically.

“It’s a model that doesn’t sit neatly with our accountability system. But it wasn’t supposed to. It was designed with child development in mind.”