The Story Behind the World
Different Isn't Deficit
They called me scatterbrained. They weren't wrong exactly. I could lose my shoes, forget what day it was and miss an entire lesson daydreaming out of the window , all before lunch.
Every single school report said the same thing. Scatterbrained. Daydreamer. And , without fail, every single time, as if they'd all read the same script , talks too much.
But hand me a Nancy Drew mystery or a Famous Five and I was gone. Completely, utterly, do-not-attempt-to-speak-to-me gone. Hours would pass. I wasn't scatterbrained then. I was laser focused , just on something that actually mattered to me.
And the talking? Turns out I wasn't talking too much. I was thinking out loud. Processing. Connecting. Asking the questions nobody had got to yet.
Nobody joined those dots at the time. The girl who can't concentrate, reads a book in one sitting and apparently cannot stop talking were three different problems , rather than one very obvious clue.
That clue, it turns out, was the whole story.
That scatterbrained, can't-focus, talks-too-much kid? She grew up to simplify complex data systems for organisations that couldn't make sense of them themselves. To stand on stages talking about technology and unconscious bias. To run coaching circles that held women together through a pandemic. To spot the pattern in the room that nobody else had noticed yet.
The scatterbrain was the asset. It just took a while for the world to catch up.
Then I had children. Three of them. And the whole thing started again.
My eldest arrived in the world already questioning it. At five he wasn't playing with his Transformers , he was dismantling them and rebuilding them into entirely new ones. Better ones. His own designs. The report cards said can't sit still and , of course , talks too much. He challenged everything with a but why that could stop a room.
He's now studying music and songwriting. His university personal statement read like it deserved a literary prize. His conceptual thinking is, and I mean this literally, universe wide.
My second didn't speak until he was two. We called him Silent Bob. When he did speak, it turned out he'd just been quietly accumulating everything. At four he could name every single dinosaur. Perfectly. He knows everything there is to know about science , not because he was taught it, but because he inhaled it. Put him in an exam hall though and he falls apart.
The system saw the handwriting. It missed the encyclopaedia living behind it.
My youngest recited the planets of the solar system at three. He is cheeky and insatiably curious and uses vocabulary that would challenge a university student , until he gets overwhelmed. When he doesn't feel safe, the words disappear entirely. But he will spend hours , hours , building digital marble runs and designing geometry dash levels with a focus and precision that would shame most adults.
Three children. Three completely different minds. Three different ways of being brilliant that the system had no language for , except the one it always reaches for.
Not quite right. Needs extra support. Cause for concern.
And children, being children, don't hear "the system isn't built for you." They hear something much simpler and much more devastating.
I am the problem.
I watched my boys start to believe that. Watched the confidence quietly leave. Watched them begin to shrink themselves to fit a container that was never going to fit them. Watched the but whys get quieter. The curiosity go underground. The light dim just enough to be worrying.
The boy who rebuilt Transformers at five started wondering if he was stupid.
The boy who knew every dinosaur started believing he was broken.
The boy who recited planets at three started feeling like a burden.
None of that was true. Not a single word of it.
Then I counted. Three sons. All of them. And then I counted myself.
Four out of four. That's not a coincidence. That's not a series of unfortunate deficits requiring individual management plans. That's a pattern. And patterns mean something.
Something shifted in me then. I decided that history was not going to repeat itself. I couldn't give them a system that saw them. But I could give them one thing I never had.
Belief. In their brilliance. Unconditional and non-negotiable. Even if , especially if , it was only coming from me.
So I looked up from my own four and I looked at the wider world. And I saw the same thing everywhere.
A SEND crisis that nobody can explain. Specialist school places that don't exist. Provisions that are underfunded, overstretched and frankly, in places, ridiculous. A system creaking under the weight of children it was never designed to hold.
And what does the conversation do with that? It looks for someone to blame. Gentle parenting. Overdiagnosis. Screen time. Social media. The children themselves , too soft, too sensitive, too difficult.
Nobody stops to ask whether the container is the problem.
Our education system was built for the industrial era. It was designed to produce compliant, reliable, linear thinkers who could follow instructions, sit still and repeat information on demand. It was brilliant , for factories. For assembly lines.
That world is gone.
The world we are actually living in , the technological era , doesn't need more instruction followers. It needs pattern recognition. Systems thinking. Lateral connection. The ability to ask not just what is the answer but why does the question exist at all.
From Year 3 to Year 8 , five years , children are taught photosynthesis. Five years. The same process. The same diagram. The same labels. What do plants need to make food? Sunlight. Water. Carbon dioxide. Correct. Next.
That's Level 1. And we revisit it. Every. Single. Year.
Level 2 , why does it matter? What is the relationship between a plant turning light into energy and the air you are breathing right now in this room?
Level 3 , forests communicate through underground root networks in ways science is only beginning to understand. What does that tell us about intelligence? About connection? About whether nature is as passive as we were taught , or whether it's doing something we don't yet have the language for?
That's where curiosity lives. That's the question that leads somewhere extraordinary. And we never get there.
And yet , despite the system rather than because of it , the world keeps being changed. By the daydreamers. The scatterbrains. The ones who talked too much and couldn't sit still and kept asking but why.
Imagine , just imagine , what they could have done if the system had been built for them instead of against them.
We are benchmarking brilliant children against a broken system and calling it assessment. The children aren't broken. They never were. You've been looking at this all wrong.
My youngest asked me recently why he has to learn about history. Everyone in it is dead, he said. Completely reasonable observation.
I opened my mouth to give him the answer I was given. So we don't make the same mistakes. And then I stopped. Because we learned about Hitler at school. Every single one of us. And right now, today, we are watching events unfold around the world and struggling to call them what they are.
The real answer is this: we don't study history so we don't repeat it. We study history so we recognise the pattern when it's happening in front of us. Not in a textbook. In real time.
My son didn't need a curriculum to ask the right question. He just needed someone to take it seriously instead of reaching for the comfortable answer.
That's what we owe every child. Not the script. The real conversation. That's what I'm building. One question at a time.