The Private Island

The deputy head said it to me more than once.

He’ll be fine. He’ll be a millionaire, sitting on a private island one day, just like Richard Branson.

It was meant to be reassuring. It wasn’t. It was the school telling me, with a smile, that they had clocked my son’s potential and decided it absolved them of responsibility for his present. The private island was doing a lot of work in that sentence. It was the horizon they could point to instead of looking at what was happening right now, in their building, on their watch.

My heart would sink and my rage would build. The response, every time, was the same: we need to keep his self-esteem and his dignity intact in order for him to get there.

They didn’t have an answer to that. It wasn’t the conversation they thought they were having.

Let’s talk about Richard Branson.

Branson has dyslexia and ADHD. He left school at sixteen. His teachers told him he was lazy and dumb. He couldn’t keep up, couldn’t fit in, couldn’t perform in the way the system required. By any of its own measures, the system failed him completely.

He then built a multi-billion pound empire.

The deputy head’s version of this story is: see, it works out. The neurodivergent child who struggled through school and came out the other side extraordinary — proof that the struggle was either necessary, or at least not fatal.

I want to offer a different reading.

Branson is not ‘evidence’ that the system works. Branson is evidence of what some children survive despite it.

Look more closely at two of the others on that list, and you start to see something important.

John Lennon was diagnosed dyslexic at school. He is believed to have had ADHD. He struggled with spelling, couldn’t retain information the way the system required, and never learned to read music. Not a note. Everything he did — one of the most significant bodies of popular music of the twentieth century — came from learning by ear, by repetition, by feel. The thing the school logged as a deficit was, in another room entirely, the whole point.

Ingvar Kamprad, who founded IKEA, had dyslexia and ADHD. He couldn’t remember product codes — a basic operational requirement of the business he was building. So he named his furniture instead. Chairs got men’s names. Garden furniture got the names of Swedish islands. A workaround for a struggling brain became one of the most recognisable brand identities on the planet. The system’s failure, metabolised into something the system could never have designed.

These are not stories about triumph over adversity. They are stories about what a particular kind of brain does when it is finally in a room that has space for it. The question worth asking is not how they succeeded. It is what they were doing in all those other rooms, in all those years before, and what it cost them to stay.

And then there is the science, which says something the deputy heads of the world have not yet caught up with. The DRD4 7R variant — the gene associated with ADHD — has been nicknamed the rock star gene. It appears at elevated frequency in populations where novelty-seeking and adaptability confer survival advantage. It is the variant the school system pathologises on a Tuesday afternoon and the music industry depends on to fill stadiums on a Saturday night. And, footnote, my son hated music at school with a passion. It killed what gave his brain pure joy by breaking it down into something to be learned, dissected and reproduced parrot-fashion.

The same brain. Two different rooms. Entirely different verdicts.

Most neurodivergent children will not be Richard Branson. Most will not be John Lennon, or Ingvar Kamprad. Most will not build empires or fill stadiums or have their name on anything. They will want what most people want — a job they can manage, a relationship that works, a life that feels liveable, enjoyable and fulfilling. They want to get through. To belong somewhere. To feel capable of something. To be, on balance, happy.

They are not asking to be extraordinary. They are asking to be okay.

And the system is failing them. Not with a dramatic headline — with the slow, grinding arithmetic of everyday outcomes.

One in seven people in the UK is diagnosed neurodivergent, with the number acknowledged to be significantly higher than that, given the difficulty of achieveing a diagnosis. Even so, that is ten million people. Only 29% of autistic people of working age are in employment — the lowest rate of any disabled group. Unemployment for neurodivergent adults runs at least three times the rate for people with other disabilities, and eight times the rate for those without. Seventy percent of neurodivergent employees experience mental health difficulties. Forty-seven percent believe their condition has made it harder to find a job. And just one in four autistic pupils feels happy at school. Not thriving. Not reaching their potential. Happy. One in four. We should not be surprised, then, that one in seven young people in the UK is currently NEET — not in education, employment or training. The pipeline runs in one direction. School fails them, and then the world of work has nowhere for them either.

These are not the statistics of a system that ‘worked out in the end’. These are the statistics of a system that worked out for a very small number of exceptional people, for whom the stars were aligned and the wind was in the right direction, held them up as proof, and quietly failed everyone else.

The private island is a very convenient thing to point at when you don’t want to look at those numbers.

My son was born with a tool belt around his waist.

I mean that almost literally. As a small child, that tool belt was his identity — he wore it, lived in it, built with it. Many a flat pack met its fate. The things he made, the things he fixed, the things he took apart to see how they worked and then put back together differently. That was him. That was always him.

The school had nothing for it.

So we made a decision as a family. School was necessary — we were not going to pretend otherwise — but it was not going to be where he grew. It couldn't. And as they made explicitly clear on more than one occasion, they had no intention of trying. So, we poured our time and energy into everything it couldn’t or wouldn’t offer. The building projects. The music. The making. We found the rooms where his brain had space. We challenged him where the system had given up, and we held his sense of himself together through years of being in an institution that had no idea what to do with him.

It worked, just about. Although it was a very bumpy ride at times, he is fine. Better than fine. Those tools are real ones now — he uses them every day, building something of his own, developing a craft that the school never knew was there.

But here is what I also want to say.

My house has always been full of his friends. His people. A band of brothers — fiercely loyal, funny, kind — all of them school casualties, all of them ND, all of them birds of a feather who found each other because that is what you do when the system has nothing for you. You find the people who understand. These are lovely young men. I have watched them grow. I watch them now, forging their way in the world. Hanging out, going to the gym together, propping each other up through bereavements and break-ups and building businesses together.

Despite. Not because of.

And I think about what that education system owed them and never delivered. The waste of it. The sheer, staggering waste — of potential, of joy, of years — that we have all quietly agreed to accept as the natural order of things.

That is the con at the heart of the private island rhetoric.

It only works if the child turns out to be remarkable. It is still, at its core, a defence of neurodivergent brains on the grounds of what they might produce. And it leaves the vast majority — the ones who are not going to be Branson, who are not asking to be Branson, who never wanted any of this — entirely unaccounted for.

My son got there. His band of brothers are getting there, in their own ways, on their own terms.

No thanks to the system.

And the system will never have to answer for that. It will point to the ones who made it and call it evidence. It will never sit in the room with the ones who were quietly managed into smaller and smaller versions of themselves, until they stopped expecting very much at all. It will never be asked to account for the cost — to the children, to their families, to everyone who spent years building in parallel what the school was supposed to be doing.

The question the system has never once had to answer — the one the private island speech is specifically designed to prevent you from asking — is a simple one.

What did you do with the ten years you had them?

Next week: more from Rewired. Coming up in the series — the food. Not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political argument about what we did to childhood and who decided to let it happen. And the post-Covid generation: what lockdown did to developing brains, and why we are only beginning to see the full cost.

Rebecca Briggs is a specialist teacher and parent coach with 35 years in education, with extensive experience working with neurodivergent children and their families. She is the founder of Willow, an AI parenting companion for neurodivergent families built on her own methodology, and is currently writing her second book exploring the systemic failures behind the childhood mental health crisis. The Willow Schools pilot launches in September 2026. In June she speaks at the South West Paediatric Mental Health Network Conference.

If this piece resonated, drop WILLOW in the comments.

If you are a parent looking for daily support navigating life with a neurodivergent child, Willow was built for exactly this — the 11pm moments, the morning battles, the meetings, the doubt. You can find us at www.squarepegkids.com

Rewired continues every Friday (sometimes more frequently — I have a lot to say!)