The Crisis in the Classroom
What happens when a child struggles in the classroom?
What’s it really like for children and families living with neurodiversity?
Why is there a surge in children requiring special educational support?
In this book, Dave Clements confronts urgent questions about education and the rising levels of diagnosed needs and behavioural difficulties in schools. He combines personal accounts, research, media commentary and cultural analysis to explore why there has been such a rapid growth in identified needs, while also questioning common explanations for this trend.
Clements argues that parents play the central role in understanding what is best for their children, and that teachers remain vital in shaping classroom experience. He calls for a more honest and critical conversation about how best to support young learners, urging empathy for children and families, but also a rethink of policies and systems struggling to respond to the growing crisis in education today.
An urgent wake‑up call to the harm the needs explosion is doing to schools and our children, from someone with personal experience who can see the bigger picture. TIFFANY JENKINS, author of Strangers and Intimates
This is a brilliant, important, and timely book … For anyone concerned about the future of education, it is essential reading. STELLA O’MALLEY, author of What your teen is trying to tell you
Anyone who is seriously concerned with the problems confronting the education of young people must read this book. FRANK FUREDI, author of 100 Years of Identity Crisis
A sensible and sensitive discussion of the culture war over autism and ADHD, and its consequences for parents, teachers, and children with special educational needs. JENNIE BRISTOW, co-author of Growing Up in the Culture Wars
Clements’ sobering, thought-provoking book charts the rise of an educational and social crisis, the cultural and political forces driving it and the huge task facing those who want to deal with it. KATHRYN ECCLESTONE, co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education
Post-publication:
This is an important book because it both passionately argues a viewpoint, but swerves away from an overly simplistic, black-and-white approach … [and] probes difficult areas, unafraid to take on some sacred cows, querying why there is a surge in children requiring special educational support. CLAIRE FOX, Academy of Ideas
Clements has done a great job in asking important questions about what has gone wrong … JANE WILLS, The Autism Tribune
Dave Clements has done something quite amazing - written a book about education that is informative, humane, alights on broader important problems without being ponderous - in short, it’s a page-turner! I urge everyone to read it! ALKA SEHGAL CUTHBERT, educator, academic and director of Don’t Divide Us
Dave Clements’ book is lucid, well-informed and honest, highlighting a plethora of problems in the SEND system that many in education are reluctant to acknowledge. It is also a deep cry of parental pain: the author has skin in the game. BARONESS SPIELMAN, The House, Conservative peer and former Ofsted chief inspector
Get your copy here