‘My five-year-old neurodivergent son was suspended for 15 days’

A mum whose five-year-old son has missed 15 days of school due to suspension has said she feels like teachers are punishing him because “they cannot cope with my neurodivergent child”.

Mum Alex, 28, from Bolton said her son Benjamin, who is still waiting for an autism diagnosis, can have intense emotional reactions to minor stressors in the classroom which can be difficult to contain.

She said she sympathises with his teachers, but said her son “is not a naughty child he is neurodivergent”.

Alex has called on the government to ban suspensions for primary school children with additional needs, which she called “disproportionate and discriminatory”.

Benjamin has been suspended nine times from his primary school after incidents where he dysregulated, a term medical professionals use to describe difficulty identifying, expressing, and managing emotional responses to everyday situations.

“When it happens at home or at the shops even if I pick him up for a hug it may only make things worse,” she said.

In one case, he was asked to draw a figure eight, but when it did not look the one drawn by the teacher, he dysregulatedand it just escalated from there,” the single mum said.

She said: “I sympathise with the teachers when Benjamin becomes dysregulated especially as they may have a class of 29 other children.

“It is as if when the school cannot cope they just suspend him.”

A Bolton Council spokesman said: “As part of our Belonging in Bolton strategy, the council works with all our schools to support them to be as inclusive as possible.

Alex said she feels the school is ambivalent about her son, despite it paying for one-to-one support for Benjamin via a teaching assistant, which has led to improvements.

“When Benjamin becomes dysregulated he just needs taking to a separate room until things are restored,” she said.

In a recent meeting she said she was made to feel inadequate as a parent.

She said: “One staff member implied she would not have raised him the way I have raised him.”

Alex has started an online petition calling on the government to ban suspensions of primary school children with additional needs because she said they “can significantly impact a child’s progression”.

The petition said: “We believe that issuing suspensions to children with SEND, as young as four, is disproportionate and discriminatory.”

Department for Education (DFE) figures published in July revealed nearly half of the 954,952 suspensions in state schools in 2023/24 were among pupils getting support for special educational needs – who were three times more likely to be suspended than their classmates.