ADHD
ADHD isn't a difficulty with intelligence or effort, it's a difference in executive function: working memory, task initiation, self-regulation and the sense of time. That's why an ADHD student can lose themselves completely in something that grips them yet be unable to start a piece of homework, and why their performance so often looks inconsistent rather than weak. In a mainstream classroom that inconsistency is routinely misread as laziness, and the child hears some version of "you could do this if you just tried harder" often enough to start believing the problem is them. The academic cost then compounds quietly, not because they can't grasp the material, but because the surrounding demands of recording work, revising independently and sustaining attention across a full lesson go unsupported until the gaps eventually look like a knowledge problem. I build sessions around how ADHD actually works: short bursts of focused input, genuinely interactive tasks, movement treated as a tool rather than a disruption, and enough external structure that the student can spend their energy on the maths or science itself.
Social, Emotional, and Mental Health (SEMH)
With social, emotional and mental health needs, the behaviour is almost always communication, a student in fight, flight or shutdown cannot access learning until they feel safe, however able they are. The real barrier is rarely the subject; it's anxiety, a fragile sense of self-worth, or a nervous system that has spent years braced for the next thing to go wrong. This is where unmet need becomes most costly: it reads as defiance, defiance is met with sanctions, and the student quietly learns that education is an unsafe place that doesn't want them, a lesson that pushes them further from the classroom and, too often, toward exclusion or alternative provision. Having worked directly with young people at that end of the system, my priority is the opposite: predictability, trust, and small achievable wins that slowly rebuild the belief that they can succeed and that they belong in learning at all. The subject progress follows from that, it rarely comes first.
Anxiety
High anxiety in a learning context rarely shows up as visible distress; far more often it looks like a capable, conscientious student who freezes on anything unfamiliar, avoids putting their hand up, over-prepares to the point of exhaustion, or blanks completely in an exam despite knowing the material inside out. Because these students are usually quiet and compliant, their need is the easiest of all to miss, attention in a busy classroom goes to the disruptive, and the anxious child slips through precisely because they cause no trouble, right up until the point they can no longer cope. That's the real cost: left unaddressed, anxiety hardens into avoidance and perfectionist paralysis and, at the sharper end, into panic, burnout or an inability to attend at all. The longer it's left, the more the fear spreads from one subject to the whole idea of being tested. I work deliberately to take the threat out of learning: a genuinely low-stakes environment where mistakes are expected and useful rather than exposing, where challenge is introduced gradually and at a pace the student can tolerate, and where we separate their worth from their marks until attempting hard things stops feeling dangerous. Confidence built this way tends to hold, because it belongs to the student, it isn't a script they've memorised to survive the next assessment.
Disengaged
Disengagement is almost never about ability. It's usually a rational response to years of feeling that school isn't for them, and it often masks something underneath, an undiagnosed difficulty, an unmet need, or simply the accumulated weight of not succeeding. "I don't care" is a safer thing to say than "I tried and I couldn't," so students protect themselves by opting out. Left unaddressed, that hardens into identity, I'm just not a maths person, not a school person, and the gaps widen because the student has stopped engaging with anything new, sometimes tipping into attendance problems or refusal, with the window to turn it around narrowing as they get older. I start by rebuilding relevance and success: entry points that connect to what the student actually cares about, practical tasks over bookwork, and quick, visible progress that gives them a reason to believe it might be different this time. Once a student starts to suspect they can do it, engagement tends to look after itself.