The Orthodoxy of PBS in Schools
In response to our AGAINST PBS&ABA campaign and the launch of the Neurodiversity Affirming Toolkit, today’s Guest Contributor reflects on their experience as a SEND professional and Neurodivergent parent. They explore how their son’s journey through the special education system exposed the tensions between neurodiversity-affirming, person-centred care and school practices rooted in compliance-based, behaviourist approaches.
Content Warning: self harm, institutional harm
In education, Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) is everywhere. In fact, with the use of stamp / sticker charts, golden time rewards, and consequences for non-compliant behaviour (particularly ‘zero tolerance’ policies), it is arguable that many schools routinely use even more traditional Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) approaches. As a former Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) professional, qualified teacher, and, most importantly, a Neurodivergent mother to Neurodivergent children, I strongly welcome Neurodiverse Connection’s new interactive toolkit, ‘A practical approach to neurodiversity-affirming care and support’. However, having seen inside many schools, special schools, Pupil Referral Units and other alternative provisions, I am concerned that there is going to be a difficult time getting schools to use the toolkit (properly) in practice.
The education system, including SEND systems, are predicated on compliance, which makes PBS frameworks the natural choice for schooling. There is a particular problem across health, education and social care with the co-opting of nice sounding names without shifting away from the underlying (behaviourist) approaches or practices. We can see this from terms such as ‘person-centred’ and ‘therapeutic’ being used so ubiquitously to mean everything, that they end up meaning nothing at all. No matter what it is called, most schools (even ‘therapeutic’ special schools) are behaviourist at the core. It is refreshing to see this issue referenced in the toolkit:
‘We actively discourage you from repurposing content from existing PBS plans or using behaviourist logic to underpin or inform your use of this toolkit. This is not a plug-in alternative or a new tool for old practices. It is a departure from ‘doing to’ people and a move toward ‘being with’ people.’
NDConnection, 2026The toolkit also addresses disguised behaviourism, with useful and practical sense check questions that I hope educational practitioners will make good use of. Unfortunately, I think the scale of the problem in schools could make this a tricky issue.
I’d like to talk about my son, James*, and his lived experience of the UK SEND system. James is Autistic, primary-school aged and has very complex needs. He was non-speaking when he started at Special School Number 1, and displayed very significant distress about school attendance. The school were largely unconcerned and told us simply to show James pictures of the school and only speak positively about it. After months of him screaming at the sight of his uniform every day, we removed James from the school for a period of elective home education.
He started Special School Number 2 a couple of years later and appeared to enjoy it for two terms. However, eventually James became so distressed they educated him in a classroom alone for nearly a year before terminating the placement. By that point James was severely mentally unwell and screaming and self-injuring for up to 20 hours a day. He screamed so much he burst blood vessels in his eyes and his nose would bleed. He self-injured so severely his Paediatrician had to seek advice from a tissue viability nurse. As a mother, I cannot even begin to describe how traumatising it was to watch this play out; it can only have been even worse for James. We started to realise that James reacted with distress to standard behaviourist practices such as reward charts; thankfully Special School Number 2 identified (and crucially, clearly documented) his need for a more autonomous learning approach. After a period out of school, James recovered. A SEND tribunal directed his current special school (Special School Number 3) to take him and he started late last year. We had really high hopes for Special School Number 3 as James’ sibling has happily attended this school for years and the Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP) was now crystal clear that no PBS techniques were to be used and James was to receive a low demand education.
Unfortunately, even armed with this evidence and a legally-binding EHCP, we still could not escape the clutches of behaviourism. James continues to have limited speech so it is difficult to know what has happened to him when we're not there: he is very vulnerable. We recently found out by chance (as James got more and more distressed by Special School Number 3) that the school had a ‘Therapeutic Support Plan’ for James which included planned ignoring, scripting and inflexible boundaries to ensure James remained – quote – ‘compliant’. The school level plan spoke of using ‘certain trigger words such as “good boy” to desensitise him’. This was backfiring and severely distressing to James who had no understanding of what they were doing to him. When I initially tried to work with the school to determine what was going on, I was told that they were sorry for the problems we have at home, but the strategies were effective and James was fine in school. I have been told this by all three special schools. When challenged, professionals have always relayed that the behaviourism they are applying is ‘gentle’ and ‘effective’. I constantly asked whether James was self-injuring in school and was ‘reassured’ that he wasn’t. It was only when a self-injury James sustained at school ended up requiring emergency medical treatment that were they willing to change their approach. What was so disheartening is that we knew PBS caused James distress, we knew it resulted in school placement breakdowns, we had all the evidence (and legally-binding documents) to compel this school to work differently, and yet the school – a highly specialist school – still wouldn’t relent. That is how ingrained and insidious PBS / behaviourism is.
I have many more examples from James’ education and I can see the pattern play out time and again. Yet, it is important to note that this really isn't just about James. I know from my own professional experience how often schools will continue to march down the PBS road at almost any cost, because they fundamentally believe it is the right thing to do. They might re-package it, they might call it therapeutic or trauma-informed, but they so often just will not stop. How many other autistic children are suffering? I personally know of many. There is also a seize the moment component to all of this: if the proposed SEND reforms pass, it appears that schools will decide nearly all day-to-day provision for children (in Individual Support Plans) and there will be no way to appeal those specific decisions through a tribunal. Furthermore, the proposals strongly suggest that the only interventions used in all education settings will be from a set list of ‘evidenced based’ interventions. If there is one thing that proponents of PBS will state over and over (and over) again, it is that PBS is ‘evidence based’ (even if that evidence is of dubious quality and based on shaky ground). PBS will likely become inescapable and unappealable. In addition to this, the final choice to remove and electively home educate your own (distressed and broken) child could be restricted now the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act has passed.
It is vital that neurodiversity affirming support is properly embraced by schools, in more than name only. We should start by asking school leaders: can you move beyond the orthodoxy of Positive Behaviour Support?