Some young people can tell you everything about a subject at their kitchen table and nothing at all in a silent room with a clock on the wall. For years, families have been told that this means the young person isn’t ready, isn’t resilient enough, isn’t trying. A new United Nations report says otherwise. It says the problem is the room.

What the report says

In May 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Farida Shaheed, presented a report to the Human Rights Council on curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Buried in its careful UN language is a passage that names our learners precisely. Standardised education, it says, often fails to accommodate neurodivergent learners, who “may possess comprehensive knowledge but lack the specific cognitive processing, executive functioning or sensory profiles required for the timed, silent, high-pressure examination hall”.

Read that again. Comprehensive knowledge. The learning was never the problem.

The report goes further. It finds that high-stakes exam systems, combined with rigid rules about progression, convert assessment “from a support mechanism into an exit point from education”, generating anxiety and disengagement particularly for learners with disabilities. And it lands on a finding we would have written ourselves if anyone had asked: learners often disengage “not because they lack capacity, but because they lack meaningful pathways for recovery or re-engagement”.

Why this matters to the families we work with

Almost every learner at the haven arrived after the system reached its exit point. Some had been out of education for months. Some for years. Most had heard some version of “she’s capable, she just won’t engage” – a sentence that manages to notice the capacity and blame the child in the same breath.

What the UN report confirms is that these young people were not failing education. They were being assessed out of it, by formats that measured their sensory profile and their executive functioning under pressure rather than what they actually knew. When the only route through education runs through the timed, silent exam hall, the young people who can’t process that environment don’t get a different route. They get the door.

What a meaningful pathway back looks like

The report calls for exactly the things this school was built to provide.

  • Learning that lets young people “progress at their own developmental rhythm”. 
  • Educators who act “as mentors and facilitators rather than as authority figures”. 
  • Assessment that is continuous and formative – portfolios, projects, feedback – rather than a single high-pressure performance. 
  • Safety and trust as the precondition for learning, not the reward for it.

At the haven, that looks like no register, no requirement to turn the camera on, no requirement to speak until speaking feels possible.

 It looks like Back to Balance, a gentle reintroduction to learning for young people who need the pressure taken off before anything else can happen. 

It looks like educators who are neurodivergent themselves, teaching from lived experience rather than above it. We didn’t build it this way because a UN report told us to. We built it this way because it works. It is quietly encouraging that the highest human rights body in the world has now described the same model.

The part worth holding onto

One line from the report deserves to be pinned to the wall of every meeting where a young person’s future is decided: learners disengage not because they lack capacity, but because they lack pathways back.

If your young person has been out of school for months or years, that sentence is about them. The capacity is still there. What was missing was a pathway – and pathways can be built.

If you’d like to talk about what a gentle reintroduction to learning could look like for your family, you can read about Back to Balance or check our FAQs  on The Haven website. There’s no pressure attached to asking.