It’s officially summer! Heatwaves notwithstanding, the bunting is out as schools across the country hold their prize givings, the end of year reviews and the leavers celebrations. If it moves, it’ll have an assembly about it.
Parents are invited — teacups are lined up and if you’re at an independent school the marquee will be up with bubbles and canapés waiting for you. Frocks are on and phones are silenced. The head teacher gives a speech about what a remarkable year it has been. And then the names are called.
But here’s the thing: if you’ve been at the school for long enough, you’ll know the names before they are called. Everyone in the room does — the staff, the parents, and most of all, the kids, all of them. The same children. The ones who have always been the ones. Academic prizes. Sports cups. Leadership awards. The cup for effort, which somehow also goes to the child who has already won everything else.
Amidst much eye-rolling and yawning, the kids totally get it - death by assembly was what my son called it and indeed the end of year assembly would last between 2 and 3 hours. I kid you not. The savvy kids would call in sick. Smart move.
The rest of the room watches.
I have been in that room three times in my life. Once as a child. Twice as a mother.
I never heard my name. My children never heard theirs.
I want to talk about what that does. Not just to the children who are passed over — but to the ones who are called up, too. And about what happens to all of them, eventually, once they leave the hall.
Prize giving is not a ‘celebration’ because it’s not a neutral event. It is a sorting mechanism dressed up as community well-wishing.
Look at it like this — the school is never not teaching. Even in the moments it thinks it is simply marking achievement, it is doing something else entirely: it is showing every child in the room exactly who this institution was built for, and what kinds of human beings it considers worth recognising.
The children who watch from the rows are not simply unlucky. They are receiving information — year after year, clearly and publicly — about their place in the order of things.
For neurodivergent children, that information arrives with particular force. Not because they are more sensitive to it — though many are — but because the qualities the prize-giving hall rewards are, by design, the qualities that neuro-average systems value most. Legibility. Output. Compliance presented as excellence. The ability to perform, under pressure, in a format that the institution designed and the institution controls.
If you are twice exceptional — gifted and disabled, your abilities masked by your difficulties and your difficulties masked by your abilities — you are not even seen clearly enough to be correctly overlooked. The hall does not know what to do with you. So it does nothing. And you learn, in public, in front of your peers, that you are nothing worth doing anything with.
The concept of twice exceptionality — being both gifted and having a learning disability or neurodevelopmental condition — is well established in research but almost entirely absent from mainstream school practice.
I stumbled across Beverly Trail years ago when we were searching for anything that might help us understand our son. Twice exceptional (2e) is not a profile that is spoken about much in the UK, but it is in the US, and our son’s Educational Psychology report identified him as being 2e so I needed to find out what it meant. Trail, whose work on twice-exceptional learners [1] is among the most comprehensive in the field, argues that the lack of consistent identification frameworks means that gifted students with disabilities are routinely missed by both systems simultaneously. Their giftedness suppresses the measured severity of their difficulties. Their difficulties suppress the measured expression of their gifts. The school records neither accurately. The child receives neither the stretch they need nor the support they need. They perform somewhere in the mediocre middle — not because they are mediocre, but because the assessment machinery cannot see them clearly enough to say otherwise.
These are the children sitting in the prize-giving hall with a file that says underachieving and a brain that contains things the school has never found a way to measure.
Trail argues that the result of this identification failure is that twice-exceptional students, given the right conditions, need not merely survive in the classroom — they can thrive [1]. The right conditions. That qualifier is doing enormous work. Because the prize-giving hall is not the right conditions. It is, in fact, a near-perfect demonstration of the wrong ones.
And it was Trail’s work that became the deciding factor in us regrouping as a family — building at home what school couldn’t and wouldn’t offer. Validating him. Growing his skills in the spaces the school had written off. Keeping his dignity and self-esteem intact so that he had something left to build from. He did build from it. But he shouldn’t have had to do it despite school.
At some point in the school year — usually around neurodiversity celebration week, or whenever a well-meaning member of staff puts together a PowerPoint — there is the other assembly.
The one meant for the ND kids.
The one that says: look at all these remarkable people who are also neurodivergent. Einstein. Darwin. Alan Turing. Elon Musk. Look what is possible.
I have sat through versions of this assembly. And I have, I am ashamed to say, contributed to versions of this assembly. And I understand the impulse entirely. These children need to see themselves reflected somewhere. The curriculum has spent the rest of the year telling them, in a thousand ways, that people like them do not count.
But the neurodiversity assembly, as commonly delivered, does not solve that problem. It extends it.
Because what it tells a neurodivergent child is not you belong here. What it tells them is: you could belong here, if you turn out to be a billionaire or a scientific genius or a wartime codebreaker. It takes the one institutional moment designed to include them and turns it into another performance of exceptionalism.
Conditional acceptance is not neurodiversity affirmation. The condition, here, is genius. And most children — neuro-average and neurodivergent alike — are not going to be geniuses. They are going to be people. And the school has never built a ceremony for that.
Here is the part that is harder to say, and that I think matters enormously.
The prize-giving hall does not only damage the children it ignores. It also damages the children it calls up.
The research on high-achieving young people and mental health is unambiguous and increasingly alarming. Around 25 to 30 percent of adolescents are negatively impacted by perfectionism [2]. A meta-analysis of 284 studies found perfectionism at the root of insomnia, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, social phobia, self-harm and obsessive-compulsive disorder [2]. Perfectionism rates among college students have been rising for three decades [3].
Research published in American Psychologist found that youth growing up in high-achieving school environments — the children who win the prizes — are statistically more likely than normative samples to show serious disturbances including drug and alcohol use, anxiety, and depression, with excessive pressures to excel now listed among the top four risk factors for adolescent mental health alongside poverty, trauma, and discrimination [4]. The same body of research shows that teens with high intellectual ability often score higher on perfectionism measures — and that the drive to achieve, which the school rewards and celebrates, simultaneously increases the risk of depression and anxiety [4].
A Harvard survey report on young adult mental health found that more than half of young adults report that achievement pressure is negatively impacting their mental health, and that many are, in the researchers’ phrase, “achieving to achieve” — finding little meaning in either school or work [5].
The prize-giving hall produces two kinds of casualty and it doesn’t count either of them.
The children whose names were never called learn that they do not matter.
The children whose names were called learn that they matter only as long as they keep winning. And that is its own kind of damage — quieter, less visible, and often not apparent until the scaffolding of school results is removed and there is nothing left to perform to.
We are now in the position of counting the results.
In January to March 2026, one million young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were not in education, employment or training [6]. One million. 13.5 percent of that entire age group. The first time the figure has exceeded one million since 2013.
The Milburn interim review into youth inactivity, published in May 2026 [7], identified neurodevelopmental conditions as central to this picture. The proportion of NEET young people recording learning difficulties or autism spectrum condition as their primary health condition has risen from 7.7 percent in 2021 to 12.3 percent in 2025 [7]. The proportion of disabled NEETs citing mental health as their primary condition has almost doubled [7]. Alan Milburn’s review found that by 2025, only Romania recorded a higher youth NEET rate in Europe [7].
Over half of those NEET in 2025 had a health condition. One in five reported a mental health condition [8].
We look at these numbers and we ask: what went wrong with these young people?
That is the wrong question.
The right question is: what did we teach them, year after year, in those halls?
I was always the bridesmaid. Never the bride. I sat through prize givings as a child feeling the niggling shame of invisibility — not being called, not being seen, learning in public that the things I was good at were not the things that counted.
I sat through prize givings as a mother feeling something I was not prepared for: the hope, irrational and persistent, that this year would be different. That this year one of my boys would be called up. That the school would see what I saw. The hope did not survive contact with the reality. It never does, for families like ours.
And I have sat through prize givings as a teacher — thirty-five years of them — watching children receive the same education I received, in the same hall, delivered in the same format. Children who were twice exceptional, sitting with files that missed them entirely. Children who were gifted in ways the school had no ceremony for. Children who learned, that afternoon, exactly who this place was built for.
It was not built for them.
The sorting hat has been sorting for a very long time. And we are only just beginning to count what it has sorted out.
I am not arguing that we abolish recognition. I am arguing that we ask who designed the categories, and what kinds of human beings they were designed to see.
A school that recognises musical intelligence alongside academic intelligence. Relational skill alongside sporting achievement. Creative thinking alongside measurable output. Persistence alongside performance. The child who held it together when everything fell apart alongside the child who never had to.
These are not radical ideas. They are simply what it would look like if a school genuinely believed that the full range of human ability was worth honouring.
Right now, most schools don’t believe that. The prize giving is the proof. Not because the people running them are unkind — most are not — but because the institution was built to sort, and sorting requires a hierarchy, and hierarchies require losers.
The wrong question is: which children deserve recognition?
The right question is: who decided what recognition looks like, and who does that decision serve?
If any of this resonates with your experience — as a parent, an educator, or someone who sat in one of those halls — drop WILLOW in the comments. Rewired publishes every Friday at 9am.
If you're the parent of a neurodivergent child and you're tired of building at home what school won't offer, Willow was designed for exactly that. Willow is an AI parenting companion built on 35 years of specialist experience — not generic advice, but a methodology developed in real classrooms with real families. You can find out more at squarepegkids.com.
About the author
Rebecca Briggs is a specialist teacher and parent coach with 35 years of experience working with neurodivergent children and their families. She is the founder of Square Peg Kids and Willow — an AI parenting companion for neurodivergent families, built on her own methodology and available at squarepegkids.com. She is currently writing her second book on the systemic failures behind the childhood mental health crisis, and the Willow Schools pilot launches in September 2026.
References
[1] Trail, B.A. (2022). *Twice-Exceptional Gifted Children: Understanding, Teaching, and Counseling Gifted Students* (2nd ed.). Routledge.
[2] Limburg, K., Watson, H.J., Hagger, M.S. and Egan, S.J. (2017). The relationship between perfectionism and psychopathology: A meta-analysis. *Journal of Clinical Psychology*, 73(10), 1301–1326. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22431
[3] Curran, T. and Hill, A.P. (2019). Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. *Psychological Bulletin*, 145(4), 410–429. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000138
[4] Luthar, S.S., Kumar, N.L. and Zillmer, N. (2020). High-achieving schools connote risks for adolescents: Problems documented, processes implicated, and directions for interventions. *American Psychologist*, 75(7), 983–995. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000556
[5] Weissbourd, R. et al. (2023). *On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges*. Harvard Graduate School of Education / Making Caring Common Project. Available at: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/23/10/mental-health-challenges-young-adults-illuminated-new-report *(Survey report; not peer-reviewed.)*
[6] House of Commons Library (2026). *NEET: Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training*. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06705/
[7] Milburn, A. (2026). *Young People and Work: Interim Report*. GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report
[8] Department for Education (2026). *NEET Age 16 to 24: Annual Brief 2025*. Explore Education Statistics. Available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/neet-statistics-annual-brief/2025
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