Your child is in school. There is a shadow teacher. The worksheet is shorter than everyone else’s. The school says he is settled. Nobody is complaining.
And every year, he needs slightly more help than the year before.
That is the pattern I want to describe, because it is extremely common in Delhi schools, it looks like success from the outside, and it is the single thing most likely to decide whether a child can manage adult life on their own terms.
The bracket
Schools are organised to sort children into categories and then apply the support that matches the category. It is not malice — it is how an institution with forty children in a room can function at all. So a child gets a bracket: needs a shadow, gets extra time, does the simplified sheet.
The bracket then becomes the plan. And the plan stops being about the child.
Here is the cost. Support given to get through today is designed to remove difficulty. Support given to build independence is designed to reduce itself — a little less help this month than last, on purpose, at a pace the child can take. Those are different things. Most children are receiving the first and everyone involved believes it is the second.
Why rigidity grows rather than shrinks
Children who find the world unpredictable manage it by making it predictable. The same seat, the same order, the same route, the same words. When school support’s main goal is a calm day, the fastest way to get one is to let the pattern stand — so the pattern is protected, every day, by well-meaning adults.
The pattern then hardens. A year later the child can do the day, but only this exact day. Change the teacher and it collapses. That is not the child becoming more autistic. That is a child who has been given no practice at the thing they find hard, by adults who were measured on whether today went smoothly.
Flexibility is built by meeting very small, planned amounts of difficulty, repeatedly, with support that is deliberately withdrawn. It is uncomfortable and it has to be designed.
The questions worth asking at the next school meeting
- What is my child expected to do without help by the end of this year that they need help with now?
- How will the shadow’s involvement be reduced, and on what timetable?
- Which of these adjustments are building a skill, and which are only making today work?
- What is being practised that my child currently finds hard?
A school that can answer those is doing the real work. A school that cannot is managing your child, which is not nothing, but it is not the same.
What this has to do with us
We do not replace the school. We work out what your child’s difficulty actually is, what they can do and what they can do only with help, and we write the plan that moves the second list into the first — then we teach you and, where the school will work with us, them. The target is not a calmer Tuesday. It is a young person who can manage without the scaffolding.
In Delhi: we work with families from schools across west and south-west Delhi and can prepare written recommendations you can take into a school meeting. Book an appointment