Responding to Neurodivergence in the Youth Justic

8 principles articulated in General Comment No. 24 imply that detention is incompatible with the state's obligations. Children's own voices are absent from decisions about them. Across education, health and justice, decisions about a neurodivergent child's needs, abilities and support are routinely made for them rather than with them (Creaney et al., 2024). The absence of the child's own account of what they experience and need can compound stigma, anxiety and disengagement (Fisher et al., 2025). The participatory principle the state has committed to under the UNCRC (Article 12) is not, in practice, reaching this population. Cross-sector coordination is structurally inhibited . Education, health, social care and justice settings operate on incompatible data systems, with no functioning information flow even within sectors - between NHS trusts, for example, or between police forces (Children's Commissioner, 2023; Kemp, 2023). Children entering the secure estate often arrive without their educational, health or social care history accompanying them; on release, information learned about the child in custody is not reliably transmitted back. The educational cost of this is particularly acute: without access to prior records, children are frequently re-assessed from scratch on entry to the youth estate, losing valuable time, compounding assessment- fatigue, and driving further disengagement from education. Successive safeguarding reviews have called for better information flow (The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, 2026), yet the underlying data-sharing architecture has not been reformed to make that learning operational. Domestic data protection regimes are not currently configured to recognise that under-sharing of safeguarding information is, for this population, a more frequent and more consequential harm than over-sharing. The implementation gap . Whilst concrete knowledge about the over-representation of children with neurodivergent conditions in the youth justice system has existed for well over a decade (see Hughes et al., 2012), practical responses to this knowledge have been slow. The SEND system in schools is in crisis through under-resourcing, and is currently under reform (Department for Education, 2026). Responsibility for a child's Education, Health and Care Plan is, in practice, contested and ambiguous when that child enters the secure estate. There is also a lack of clarity relating to procedures, practice and responsibilities relating to the planning and transition of a child from the secure estate back to the community. External accountability measures often reward exclusion, profiling schools with high performance and low levels of behaviours that challenge expected norms. Consequently, zero-tolerance behaviour policies continue to be part of the national narrative despite a consistent evidence base demonstrating harm. These same accountability pressures can also drive 'off-rolling' where children are removed from the school to improve a school's performance data rather than in the child's interest. In the secure estate, workforce conditions generate burnout and turnover at rates incompatible with sustained relational practice (Zempi, 2025). Staff are often early-career, may be neurodivergent themselves, and receive limited training and support.