The Words We Use Without Thinking

A few years ago I caught myself describing a student as "a bit much" before I'd even worked out what I meant by it. He wasn't a bit much. He was bright and funny, asking 12 questions a minute because his brain moved faster than the lesson did. The phrase had nothing to do with him and everything to do with my own tiredness that day.

I've been thinking about this again after reading a piece by Jarlath O'Brien, director of school improvement at a multi-academy trust for special schools, who is opening a new school this September for children with social, emotional and mental health needs. He and his team have spent the run-up to opening on purpose deciding which phrases they will not let take root in their school's culture. His argument is simple: culture doesn't wait for you to design it. If you don't choose your language deliberately, it grows on its own, the way mould grows in a damp corner. You get a culture either way. The question is whether you got the one you wanted.

That line stuck with me because it's exactly what I see in tutoring, just from a different angle.

I work with GCSE and A-Level students, many of them neurodivergent, and I hear the same handful of phrases recycled from classroom to classroom, report to report, parents' evening to parents' evening. None of them are said with malice. That's what makes them worth looking at.

"He's just not capable of it."

Said about a topic, usually, but heard by the child as a verdict on them. Capability isn't fixed. It's a snapshot of where someone is right now, with the teaching, scaffolding and time they've had so far. I've watched students go from "not capable" to top grades within a term once the actual barrier, whether that's processing speed, working memory, or just a teaching style that didn't fit them, got identified and worked around. The phrase describes today. It gets used as if it describes forever.

"She's attention seeking."

This one gets trotted out whenever a student's behaviour doesn't have an obvious cause. O'Brien makes the point better than I can: a child acting out is usually trying to influence their environment because something isn't working for them, not performing for an audience. I'd add that most of the students I've worked with who got labelled this way were, in fact, seeking something. Just not attention. Usually it was certainty, or relief, or someone to notice they were drowning in a lesson that had left them behind three weeks ago.

"The parents are overbearing."

I want to push back on this one hardest, because I hear it constantly and it makes me genuinely cross. Most of the parents I work with are exhausted. They are fighting for an EHCP, chasing a diagnosis, translating between school and clinician and their own child, often while holding down a job and the rest of family life. Calling that "overbearing" reframes advocacy as a personality flaw. It lets everyone else off the hook for asking why a parent felt they had no other option but to push.

"He kicked off."

A phrase that turns a dysregulated nervous system into a discipline problem. It's quicker to say, which is probably why it survives. But it tells a member of staff nothing about what to actually do next. "Dysregulated" tells you the job in that moment is regulation, not correction.

None of these phrases are used by bad people. That's the uncomfortable bit. They're used by tired, well-meaning adults reaching for shorthand under pressure, and shorthand hardens into belief faster than any of us notice. Say "low ability" enough times and eventually you stop checking whether it's still true.

O'Brien's point about building a school from nothing applies just as well to a single tutoring session, a single family conversation, or a single moment in a classroom. You don't need a blank slate to choose your language on purpose. You just need to notice the phrase before it comes out, and ask what it's actually describing.

I'm still working on it myself. That's the honest ending, not a tidy one.

Reading that prompted this: Jarlath O'Brien's piece for Tes on the language schools cut to build a more inclusive culture.