Supporting PDA at School: Why Good Strategies Sometimes Don't Work

Imagine walking into a classroom where everyone is working incredibly hard—teachers, support staff, therapists, leadership—and yet the child who needs the most support is still overwhelmed, still distressed, still not accessing learning. The plans look good on paper, the team genuinely cares, but despite all the effort, things aren’t getting easier. To the contrary, some days, it feels like things are getting harder.

That’s the reality in so many schools right now. We’re facing rising levels of anxiety, burnout and school-based trauma for PDA learners—and we don’t have time to keep trialling ideas, one at a time - hoping something sticks. When new strategies clash with existing systems and processes, the result isn’t just confusion; it can actually increase distress for the children we’re trying to support. The downstream effect of this can be reduced morale and burnout amongst our incredible educators and support staff.

One of the biggest challenges I see in schools is how many new ideas get introduced without considering how they fit within the bigger picture; it's something many educators are familiar with. We’re often trying to fit new PDA-informed approaches into existing systems without a framework to hold it all together. It becomes a square peg, round hole situation. It just doesn’t work.

For example, we might introduce Declarative Language, but still be using whole-class reward systems. One reduces demand, the other increases it. The maths just isn’t adding up. This is just one example of how we can reduce demands in one context, while unintentionally increasing them in another.

When new approaches aren’t held within a clear framework, it’s easy to to inadvertently minimise the positive effects — perhaps reducing demands in one area whilst they remain high elsewhere.

Everyone is doing their best, but without a shared way of understanding what’s happening, it can start to feel like a game of whack-a-mole. New issues keep popping up in different places. That’s exhausting—especially for the brilliant educators and allied health professionals who are working so incredibly hard to make a real difference for the children they care about.

The problem usually isn’t a lack of effort or care—it’s a lack of a shared framework and opportunities for effective collaboration.

Through almost two decades of working with schools and families, and within education itself, I kept seeing the same challenge come up again and again. Different settings, different children, different teams—but the same patterns. That’s why I created The Complete Toolkit for Supporting PDA at School.

The Toolkit brings together the framework, practical guidance, planning templates, case examples and the tools I use when working alongside schools. It’s designed to help teams build shared understanding and create plans that are not just hopeful, but practical and sustainable in the real world of busy classrooms and limited capacity.

Because I genuinely believe this: supporting children starts with supporting the adults. When adults have a shared framework to lean on, children are far more likely to experience consistency, safety and success—not just on the good days, but on the really tough ones too. And when we have clear processes and a shared lens for understanding things, it makes working together so much easier.

If you're interested to find out more about the framework, resources and processes for supporting PDA at school - you'll find The Complete Neuro-Affirming ToolKit for Supporting PDA at School here.