Square Peg Season: Why September Still Makes Me Want to Lie Down in a Dark Room
It's that time of year again. New shoes. New jumper with the sleeves rolled up because nobody makes a jumper that fits an ADHD kid's actual arms. New school year, same old conversation on the horizon.
Because here's the thing nobody tells you when your child gets diagnosed: the diagnosis doesn't come with a translator. You still have to explain, every single September, to a new teacher, a new TA, sometimes a whole new school, why your child isn't being deliberately difficult. Why "just try harder" is about as useful as telling someone with a broken leg to "just walk properly." Why sitting still for twenty minutes on a carpet is, for some children, roughly as achievable as sitting still on a trampoline.
I spent 34 years on the other side of this conversation. SENCo, dyslexia specialist, assistant head, the lot. I've sat in the staff room. I've written the reports. And I still remember the exact moment it clicked for me that we'd built a system around the average child, then acted surprised when the children who weren't average kept falling through the gaps we'd designed into the floor.
The Square Peg Problem
You know the phrase. Square peg, round hole. Except in most classrooms, nobody's questioning the hole. The hole is fixed. Sacred, almost. Every September, we hand a slightly different square peg to a slightly different round hole and act baffled when it doesn't slot in neatly.
ADHD is still viewed more harshly than a lot of other additional needs in UK schools. Not officially, of course. Nobody writes that on a policy document. But ask any parent of an ADHD child how many times they've heard "he's just testing boundaries" versus how many times a child with a physical disability gets told they're "just testing boundaries" for needing extra time on stairs. The double standard is baked in so deep most people don't even clock it's there.
Meanwhile the parents are doing the actual heavy lifting. Reading the reports in three different fonts. Turning up to meetings with a folder that's thicker than the minutes taken in it. Learning the language of EHCPs and outcomes and provision because nobody else is going to translate it for free.
What Actually Helps (Because I Know You Didn't Come Here Just for the Rant)
I'm not going to tell you your child has a superpower. They don't need to be magic to deserve support. They just need the adults around them to stop measuring square pegs with a round ruler.
A few things that genuinely shift the dial before term starts:
Get the transition meeting booked now, not in week three. Once term is properly underway, everyone's too busy firefighting to think strategically. A fifteen minute conversation in the last week of August saves you six weeks of chasing in October.
Write it down and hand it over. Don't rely on information travelling by osmosis between last year's teacher and this year's. A one page "what works for my child" summary, handed over directly, does more good than any amount of hoping it's in the file somewhere.
Remember Barkley's point about the gap. ADHD isn't a knowledge deficit, it's roughly a 30% developmental lag in the skills that let a child act on what they know, when they know it. Your child probably knows the rule. Knowing it and being able to act on it in the moment are two entirely different skills, and one lags behind the other for years. That's not an excuse. It's biology, and it's worth saying out loud to a teacher who thinks repetition alone will fix it.
You are allowed to be the informed one in the room. You've read more about your own child's brain than most of the professionals you'll meet this term have had time to. That's not arrogance. That's just what happens when you've had no choice but to become the expert.
The Bit Where I Say the Quiet Part Out Loud
The child isn't the problem. I know that's become a bit of a cliche, the kind of thing that gets slapped on a mug. But it's still true, and it still needs saying every September, because the system has a short memory and parents don't get the luxury of forgetting.
You're not difficult. You're informed. And this year, you're going in with your ducks in a row.
Need a script for the transition meeting, or a one-page handover sheet you can actually hand a teacher without writing it from scratch? That's exactly the kind of thing I build for parents day to day.
