Some children understand before they can make their understanding visible.
An answer may arrive first as an image, a connection, or a certainty tugging at the edge of language. A child may need to move before the thought settles, may notice a pattern nobody else has spotted, or question a rule because they can see who it disadvantages. They may ask a question that seems to interrupt the lesson because their mind has already travelled beyond the place where the lesson expected them to stop. From the outside, such instances can look like hesitation, distraction, disorder, or refusal. Inside, the mind is working. The idea is real; it just hasn’t found its shape yet.
The unfairness begins when only a narrow kind of evidence is trusted: the orderly explanation, the visible steps, the answer produced at the expected speed. Then the child is judged not by the thinking that’s happening, but by how closely it resembles the thinking the system already knows how to reward. Some minds resemble it naturally — plenty, including many neurodivergent minds, value sequence, predictability, clear instructions, and a well-marked path — and the ways of thinking described above don’t belong to every neurodivergent person, nor are they exclusive to neurodivergent people. The mismatch I’m interested in isn’t one particular talent or one kind of neurodivergent mind, but the gap between the work a mind is doing and the narrow range of shapes in which that work is most readily recognised.
Teachers need ways to establish what has been learned. The problem begins when the shape that’s easiest to check becomes the fullest measure of a mind. We need to be more honest about what a task is actually measuring. A written explanation tests knowledge, yes, but it also tests handwriting, verbal fluency, working memory, and the ability to line thoughts up in a queue. Speed shows recall, but slowness doesn’t mean the thinking is shallow. Sitting still makes a classroom easier to manage, but it doesn’t tell us whether movement is helping or preventing thought. Every task bundles understanding together with other demands, so when a child struggles, the mark they receive doesn’t show which part they struggled with; it simply equates everything to understanding. That is how the evidence a child produces gets mistaken for the limit of what the child knows. For the system, that’s a measurement error. For the child, it sounds like a verdict on their mind.
And the genuine tragedy of this mis-measurement is that children begin forming beliefs about their own minds long before they have the language or experience to question the judgements made about them.
Too slow. Too distracted. Too messy. Too intense. Too literal. Too sensitive. Too much.
Over time, they may stop asking whether the task or environment fits the way they think and begin to assume that their mind itself is the problem. A child who understands differently repeatedly gets judged as understanding less, and eventually may make the same judgement about themselves.
Yet a child in that position may be struggling to translate rather than failing to think. They may be sorting too much information rather than noticing too little, or trying to work out which of several possible beginnings will allow them to start. This is where the ‘gold standard’ of assessment and measurement lets such children down. A child who thinks in images may need to learn that having trouble putting an idea into words isn’t the same as having no idea. A teenager who notices many competing details may need help identifying which ones matter most. Someone whose thoughts arrive rapidly may need support choosing where to begin, rather than being told there was nothing coherent in the rush. A young person who reaches an answer through instinct may need help translating it into a shape other people can follow. Imagine how much less of that thinking would be lost with targeted, meaningful support. And there is plenty of evidence that ways of thinking which are awkward to measure in childhood become far more welcome in adulthood.
GCHQ has publicly described dyslexic thinking as valuable to its work, particularly in recognising patterns across large amounts of data, seeing complex situations as a whole, and finding solutions to unfamiliar problems.[1] JPMorgan Chase has described its Autism at Work programme as a competitive advantage, including an example of an autistic employee who raised a potential cybersecurity concern involving electric-vehicle chargers before a related vulnerability appeared in the news.[2] In 2024, software and data quality engineering company Ultranauts reported that 75 per cent of its team was neurodivergent.[3] These accounts come from the organisations themselves, and research into claims about particular neurodivergent strengths remains developing and sometimes mixed.[4] They should be treated as illustrations rather than proof that people with a particular diagnosis share a predictable set of abilities.
But what they illustrate is how recognition can arrive late. The child who was told to stop noticing irrelevant details may become the adult valued for detecting a risk other people missed. The student who struggled to show every step may later be praised for seeing how several apparently separate problems connect. Once the result is visible, the thinking behind it gets described as insight, creativity, or innovation.
That recognition is encouraging, but it raises an uncomfortable question: why does thinking need to become commercially useful before society finds it easier to value? A young person’s mind isn’t important because an intelligence agency, a bank, or a software company may one day find a use for it. Its worth doesn’t depend on a compensating gift arriving on schedule, or arriving at all. Some neurodivergent people have striking strengths. Some have quieter ones. Some live with difficulties that no amount of reframing turns into an advantage. All deserve the same dignity, patience, access, and support. Nobody should have to earn acceptance by dazzling.
This is also why support can’t be justified only as a way of uncovering hidden potential. Support matters whether or not a conspicuous strength ever appears. It matters because young people deserve to learn, participate, communicate, and move through the world with less avoidable strain.
And support means teaching the things that are genuinely hard. A child who understands something intuitively still deserves help learning how to test and explain it. A child who struggles to read deserves everything we know about effective reading instruction, delivered with patience and without shame. A young person who finds planning difficult may need practical systems, reminders, repeated teaching, and adult help rather than reassurance alone. Strength and struggle aren’t in competition; recognising one isn’t a reason to neglect the other.
But support shouldn’t become a one-way process in which the child is taught to translate themselves into shapes the system already prefers while the system remains unchanged. The environments around the child also have work to do. Where a particular method isn’t itself the learning objective, schools need to offer more than one credible way for a child to demonstrate what they know. Movement, visual explanation, discussion, additional processing time, practical demonstration, and assistive tools shouldn’t automatically be treated as ways of avoiding the real task; in some cases, they’re what allow the real thinking to become visible. This doesn’t mean removing every expectation or making every task effortless. It means becoming more honest about which difficulties are essential to the learning and which have been created by the shape in which the learning is required to appear.
The work has two directions: helping young people understand their own minds, and widening the conditions in which those minds can be understood. Without the first, children may continue to interpret difference only as failure. Without the second, self-understanding risks becoming another way of asking them to carry the full burden of adapting.
I can’t wave a magic wand and make that two-way work the new normal. But I can imagine what it would build: a world in which children grow up understanding their own minds and having those minds understood in turn, where no child learns to call themselves slow, or thick, or too much or too little of anything. That vision sits at the heart of my YA fantasy novel, where the traits that make a girl feel strange in her own world become part of how she encounters a much larger truth — a MultiVerse that needs many kinds of minds — and where her mind is given a name of its own: TriFold. These essays take their name from that story, and from the same conviction: that the shape of a person’s thinking should be seen as part of its value, rather than mistaken for its limit.
For the challenge we all face isn’t simply to help every mind produce the same evidence more successfully. It’s to become better at recognising how much understanding our preferred shapes leave unseen.
Sources
[1] GCHQ, “Dyslexic thinking skills are mission critical for protecting the country,” 29 April 2021: https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news/dyslexic-thinking-skills
[2] JPMorgan Chase, “Proven Value: Autism at Work,” 18 December 2023: https://www.jpmorganchase.com/newsroom/stories/autism-at-work
[3] Ultranauts, “About Team-X,” 23 November 2024: https://ultranauts.co/team-x/about/
[4] For contrasting evidence on proposed neurodivergent strengths, see: Nadyanna M. Majeed, Andree Hartanto and Jacinth J. X. Tan, “Developmental dyslexia and creativity: A meta-analysis,” Dyslexia 27, no. 2 (2021), 187–203: https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1677; and Katherine J. Maw, Geoff Beattie and Edwin J. Burns, “Cognitive strengths in neurodevelopmental disorders, conditions and differences: A critical review,” Neuropsychologia 197 (2024), 108850: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.108850