Different wiring
I have spent my career inside the NSW public school system. The longer I am inside it, the clearer one thing becomes: ADHD and autism are not disorders. They are wiring. A different operating mode in a brain the current school system was not built for.
The kids I am writing about think half a second ahead of the adults around them. They do not sit still. They do not make easy eye contact. They ask the kind of questions that make adults uncomfortable. They are usually bright, often funny, frequently lonely, and almost always quietly told — by the structure of school itself — that the problem is them.
It is not them. It is the structure.
What this site is for
This is a small place where I write down what I see. Names removed. Specifics generalised. Years of staffroom evidence, parent meetings, suspension reports, and budget line-items. There is a story underneath all of it, and the story is not the one the Department prefers.
"The system isn't designed for all kids… but it could be. It should be."
What I want
I want kids who are wired differently to reach what they were built to reach. I want the classroom adjusted, not the child. I want the funding tagged for diagnosis support to actually arrive in classrooms. I want teachers free to say what they see without being labelled difficult. I want parents free to ask hard questions without being labelled aggressive.
None of this requires money the system doesn't already have. It requires honesty about where the money already goes.
Who I am
I'm a teacher at South Sydney High. I've been one for long enough to know what the system protects and what it allows to fall through. The rest is in the writing.