The burden that is doubled before the child does anything
A team from King’s College London and UCL — Myrofora Kakoulidou, Georgia Pavlopoulou, Jane Hurry, Edmund Sonuga-Barke and colleagues on the RE-STAR programme — has published a study in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that does something the field rarely manages: it puts neurodivergent students and the school staff who support them in the same enquiry, and lets each hear the other. Eleven students aged 11 to 16, all with autism or ADHD diagnoses, and twelve staff across ten mainstream secondary schools, worked through a series of focus groups using applied-theatre and multimedia methods, co-facilitated by neurodivergent young researchers. The aim was to find the sources of emotional distress in school, and what actually reduces it.
The finding that frames everything comes from the research programme this study builds on, and it is stark. Neurodivergent adolescents face higher exposure to emotionally distressing school events, experience them at roughly twice the intensity, and consequently carry about twice the school-induced emotional burden of their neurotypical peers — a burden strongly associated with anxiety and depression. That is the number to sit with. It is not that these students are twice as fragile. It is that the same school day deposits twice as much distress on them, and the distress is manufactured by the setting before the child has done anything at all.
This is why the paper’s framing matters as much as its data, and why it belongs to the shift I’ve argued for repeatedly. The authors are explicit that they are moving the focus from within-person deficits to the cumulative impact of the environment — and they say plainly that most existing interventions get this backwards, framing emotion regulation as the responsibility of the neurodivergent young person and emphasising compliance with school norms. Programmes like Zones of Regulation, or school mindfulness rollouts, are named as individual “fixes” that leave the actual contributors to distress untouched: sensory overload, punitive behaviour policies, academic pressure, and a lack of neurodiversity-informed teacher training.
You cannot regulate your way out of a room that is generating the dysregulation. Neurodiversity-informed, on this account, means fixing the room. As when the researchers listened to the adults in the room, they found that room was doing something to them too.
A distress that fills the room rather than sitting at one desk
The most striking result in the study is not in the students’ accounts but in the overlap between theirs and the staff’s. Asked about their own emotional lives at school, staff described what the paper calls a “tsunami of feelings” — overwhelmed, anxious, emotionally drained, helpless, guilty about not doing enough, sometimes not sleeping, sometimes crying at work. One teacher described days from eight until two with no break at all, and the effect that had on the quality of their interactions with students.
What matters is that this is the same list the students gave. The staff were mirroring the exact emotions the young people reported — the same overwhelm, the same anxiety, the same helplessness, even the same hiding of feelings. One staff member captured it precisely, saying of the collective mood that “we’ve all become used to feeling the same way.” The distress was not a property of the disordered child that the calm adults then managed. It was a field filling the whole room, settling on everyone inside it.
This reframes the problem completely, and it is where the study quietly meets the double empathy problem, which the authors cite directly. If the environment produces the same distress in staff and students alike, then the difficulty was never located in the neurodivergent child’s faulty regulation — it was in a shared setting that overwhelms the people in it, and then, through staff who are themselves depleted and dysregulated, escalates back onto the students who have the least capacity to absorb it. A stressed adult, the staff themselves observed, becomes snappy, reacts without thinking, and is less open to the very interactions that would help. The environment distresses the adult, the distressed adult misreads or mishandles the child, and the child’s burden climbs. It is a loop, and no one in it is the fault. The misreadings that flow from this — inattention or a stress response read as defiance — are exactly what Milton’s double empathy account predicts when two differently-wired parties meet under strain. Once the problem is seen as a shared field rather than an individual defect, the solutions the participants named make a different kind of sense.
What helped was never a repair applied to the child
Asked what actually helped, neither group reached for an individual intervention delivered to the student. What they described, almost entirely, were environmental adaptations. Quiet spaces to withdraw to. Sensory tools and calming activities. Flexibility on the inflexible behaviour policies that turned a stress response into a detention. Work paced to the student and pitched to their interests rather than a uniform standard. Warning of timetable and classroom changes before they happened. Staff who took the time to understand a young person rather than manage a behaviour.
The through-line is that every helpful practice adjusted the setting, not the child — and, tellingly, most of them cost little and were already within reach, failing only for lack of consistent leadership and whole-school coordination. The students were sharp about the difference between help and its counterfeit: being told to calm down, rather than being shown how to calm down, was worse than useless, and being told to leave their stresses “at the door” landed as a dismissal rather than support. The distinction is the whole argument in miniature — one treats the child as the thing to be corrected, the other treats the situation as the thing to be changed.
And the students asked for these adjustments to be normalised rather than singled out, which is the deepest point in the paper. A recurring source of distress was that accommodations were read by peers as special treatment, so the very support meant to reduce burden added a layer of shame and stigma on top of it — several students reported hiding their diagnosis and masking their feelings precisely to avoid being marked out. The fix for that is not to withdraw the support but to build it into the environment for everyone, so that flexibility, quiet options and paced work are simply how the school runs, not a visible exception granted to the marked child. Embedded across the system, an adjustment stops being a spotlight. It becomes the weather.
Which leaves the hardest and most practical implication of the whole study…
Why a depleted adult cannot regulate a distressed one
The uncomfortable truth the staff data forces is that you cannot ask an emotionally exhausted adult to be the calm, attuned presence a distressed child needs. Co-regulation — the process by which a settled nervous system helps settle an unsettled one — requires the adult to have something left to give. The study found staff running on empty: no breaks, constant demand for decisions they were too overwhelmed to make well, and no protected time to reflect or to share the load with colleagues. A depleted adult cannot regulate a distressed one, and a system that depletes its adults is quietly manufacturing the escalations it then disciplines the children for.
So the intervention that matters is not another regulation programme aimed at the pupil. It is a redesign of the shared environment on both sides at once: adapting the physical and policy setting so it stops generating distress, and resourcing staff — with training, supervision, and time to reflect — so they have the capacity to hold the room rather than adding to its charge. The two are the same project. You cannot reduce the students’ burden while leaving the adults underwater, because the students’ burden runs partly through the adults.
The honest reading of this study, then, is not a story about fragile children who need to be taught to cope. It is a story about a setting that deposits twice the emotional load on its neurodivergent students, distresses the staff who are meant to support them, and then locates the resulting difficulty inside the child who shows it most visibly. The finding that staff and students carry the same feelings is the quiet refutation of the deficit model: the burden is in the building, not the pupil, and the problem in the institution, not the individual. As a picture of eleven students and twelve staff across a handful of schools, self-selected and not to be over-generalised, it is necessarily partial — and it does not speak to special-education settings or to those with higher support needs. But what it shows, it shows clearly: the room was always the thing to fix.
Citations
Kakoulidou, M., Pavlopoulou, G., Hurry, J., Sonuga-Barke, E. J. S. et al. (2026, in press) — Reducing Emotional Burden Carried by Neurodivergent Students in School: Perspectives from Students and School Staff — Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Lukito, S., Chandler, S., Kakoulidou, M. et al. (2025) — Emotional burden in school as a source of mental health problems associated with ADHD and/or autism — Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
Pavlopoulou, G., Chandler, S., Lukito, S. et al. (2025) — Situating emotion regulation in autism and ADHD through neurodivergent adolescents’ perspectives — Scientific Reports
Milton, D. E. M. (2012) — On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’ — Disability & Society
