This article first appeared on 5 June 2026 in #NDChat, my newsletter on LinkedIn.

If a student is bright, articulate and just about keeping up, most schools will leave them alone. That may be the most costly mistake we make…

Because the systems we use to identify and support neurodivergent students were not designed to find this particular child.

They have ADHD, autism, or both. Their cognitive ability falls within the average range or above it. They are bright, often remarkably so. And they are invisible to a framework built almost entirely around deficit.

This is the blindspot. And it is costing thousands of students their potential.

England’s SEND framework categorises students with ADHD under Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs (SEMH), alongside anxiety disorders, depression and attachment difficulties. In practice, this leads schools to respond primarily through a pastoral and behavioural lens.

That is the wrong lens

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting attention regulation, executive function and working memory. It does not impair intellectual ability. The anxiety these students present is rarely a primary condition. It is the predictable consequence of a cognitively capable young person in an environment that does not fit how their brain works. Treat the mismatch, and the anxiety often follows. Treat only the anxiety, and nothing changes.

The same misunderstanding surrounds autism. Research shows that approximately two thirds of autistic people have no co-occurring learning disability - although, it is important to recognise that it can co-occur with other neurodivergent conditions such as DLD and DCD. Yet autism continues to be associated in educational practice with impaired learning, when for the majority of autistic students in mainstream schools the barriers are environmental, not cognitive.

The label shapes the provision. And the provision is currently failing a significant number of students who are more than able to achieve.

The Twice Exceptional Student

Educational psychology has a term for this student: twice exceptional, or 2e. These are students who demonstrate, or have the potential to demonstrate, high levels of ability in one or more areas, while simultaneously experiencing a neurodevelopmental condition that significantly affects their educational performance. Research estimates that between 2 and 5% of all students fall into this category, which in a school of 1,200 pupils is potentially 60 young people.

Their gifts and their difficulties mask each other so completely that they appear simply average. A student might demonstrate abstract reasoning at the 99th percentile for their age while their overall cognitive score appears unremarkable, because the peaks and the valleys cancel each other out. As researchers from the University of Connecticut have observed,

“Their gifts may mask their disabilities and their disabilities may mask their gifts.”

They fall between the gaps in every system designed to find them.

Being highly able does not protect these students from the emotional cost of being misunderstood. It compounds it. High cognitive ability makes them acutely aware of the gap between what they sense they should be achieving and what they are actually producing. Without anyone to explain why that gap exists, they fill the silence with the only conclusion available to them: that they are simply not good enough.

That conclusion, left unchallenged, leads somewhere very dark.

When Crisis Becomes the Referral Point

A peer-reviewed study of 947 young people experiencing significant school distress, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, found that 92% were neurodivergent and 83% were autistic (Connolly, Constable and Mullally, 2023). Over 30% of autistic pupils in England are identified as persistent absentees, missing more than 10% of sessions, a rate far exceeding that of the general school population. Children with SEN are 50% more likely to struggle with school attendance altogether.

These are not students who cannot achieve. They are students who have reached crisis point before anyone around them understood what they needed.

My daughter has ADHD. In Year 10 she spent eight months experiencing Education Based School Avoidance, convinced she would never pass another exam. The system around her had responded to what it could see, the anxiety, the avoidance, the inconsistent performance, and had not looked for what lay beneath it.

When her school finally understood her profile, everything changed. Remote learning, a reduced timetable and a carefully supported return gave her the conditions her brain actually needed.

She went on to achieve A*s and As across her iGCSEs (7-9s) and 41 points in the International Baccalaureate, the equivalent of A*A*A at A level. She has recently received an offer from Durham University to read International Relations.

This very nearly did not happen. Not because she lacked ability, but because the system lacked the knowledge to see it.

She is far from alone. The gap between potential and performance in twice exceptional students is not a measure of their ceiling. It is a measure of how far the environment has failed to meet them.

5 Ways to Successfully Untap the Potential

1 - Stop interpreting the behaviour and start understanding the profile. A student who is disengaged is not necessarily disaffected. Research on twice exceptional students consistently shows that under-stimulation produces the very behaviours schools mistake for a primary problem. These students disengage when they are bored, not when they are challenged. Reducing expectation compounds the difficulty. Raising it, carefully, often resolves it.

2 - Recognise that many of these students have a specific weakness in rote learning and oral processing. They may have strong written reasoning but struggle to retain uncontextualised facts or process extended spoken instruction reliably. A lesson built around listening and memorising will consistently underrepresent what they know. Teaching to patterns, principles and meaning rather than isolated facts plays directly to their strengths.

3 - Look beyond attainment data. Most schools assess what students produce rather than what they are capable of producing. Attainment tells us what a learner has demonstrated under specific conditions. It cannot tell us how much effort was required to produce that outcome, whether conditions supported or constrained performance, or what the learner understood but could not show.

Without triangulating attainment with aptitude data and a genuine understanding of the student’s attitude to learning, the gap between potential and performance remains invisible. For most neurodivergent students, that triangulation never happens. There is no educational psychology report. There are no standardised assessments of cognitive ability sitting alongside their grades. There is only the output, and the output is being read as the whole story.

For the students fortunate enough to have received an educational psychology assessment, that report can be genuinely transformative, but only if it is used. Shared with the student in age-appropriate terms and framed around their strengths, it can reframe years of accumulated self-doubt and replace a false explanation with an accurate one. This is not pastoral care. It is precision intervention.

4 - Allow self-regulation. Stimming is not a distraction. For many students with ADHD and autism it is the mechanism that makes concentration possible. Suppressing it removes a coping strategy without replacing it with anything.

5 - Understand that the single most evidenced protective factor for these students, across multiple peer-reviewed studies, is a relationship with a teacher who sees their ability.

Not a programme. Not a reclassified SEND category. A human being who looks past the difficulty and communicates, consistently, that they can see what is there.

One final point the evidence makes impossible to ignore

However well-intentioned, pressure is counterproductive for these students. They already carry a significant internal pressure of their own, driven by perfectionism and a painful awareness of the gap between their potential and their performance. Adding external pressure does not close that gap. It widens it, and in the most vulnerable students it can trigger exactly the kind of crisis described in this article.

For both schools and parents, the approach that works is the same. Understand the cognitive profile, not just the presenting behaviour. Communicate belief in the student’s ability clearly and consistently, particularly when their own self-belief has eroded. Provide intellectual challenge rather than reducing demand. Create the conditions for psychological safety, because these students will only show what they are capable of when they feel genuinely supported rather than judged.

The goal is not to manage their difficulty. It is to release their potential.

Untapped! Unlocking the potential in neurodivergent students is the latest evidence-informed training module from HeadFirst Consulting. It gives educators the knowledge to see these students clearly, understand what they need, and create the conditions for their potential to be realised.

All training is designed and delivered by me, a former headteacher who has sat in every chair around the table: as a student, as a teacher, as a school leader, and as a parent. This is not theory. It is hard-won understanding, reframed into practical knowledge that schools can use from day one.

To talk about training for your school, book a free discovery call or email hello@headfirstconsulting.com.

References

Ambitious about Autism. (2022). Autistic pupils and school absence. ambitiousaboutautism.org.uk

Barkley, R. A. (2015). Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: A handbook for diagnosis and treatment (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

Connolly, S. E., Constable, H. L. and Mullally, S. L. (2023). School distress and the school attendance crisis: A story dominated by neurodivergence and unmet need. Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Department for Education and Department of Health. (2015). Special educational needs and disability code of practice: 0 to 25 years. HM Government.

Foley-Nicpon, M., Allmon, A., Sieck, B. and Stinson, R. D. (2011). Empirical investigation of twice-exceptionality: Where have we been and where are we going? Gifted Child Quarterly.

Frontiers in Education. (2025). Twice-exceptional students: A systematic review to outline the distinctive characteristics through a multidimensional lens. doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1696805

McDonnell, R., Senior, J., Ioannidou, O. and Lanigan, L. (2025). The social and emotional factors affecting the mental health of gifted students with ADHD: A systematic review. Education Sciences.

NHS England. (2025). Update on learning disability and autism programme. NHS England Board Paper, September 2025.

Office for National Statistics. (2021). Pupil absence data and children with special educational needs.

Reis, S. M., Baum, S. M. and Burke, E. (2014). An operational definition of twice-exceptional learners: Implications and applications. Gifted Child Quarterly.

Tandfonline. (2025). So, what is it then; special need, SEMH, both or none? Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2025.2481013

Zeidan, J. et al. (2022). Global prevalence of autism: A systematic review update. Autism Research.