When Children Struggle: Educational and Clinical Perspectives

By Sylvia Langford · 5 min read

When a child struggles, what question do we ask first?

Over the course of my work as a psychologist and later in schools, I encountered children who struggled to concentrate, follow instructions, complete activities or participate alongside their classmates.

These difficulties were sometimes described as problems of attention, motivation or behaviour. Some children were referred to specialists for further assessment or intervention.

Clinical assessment and specialist support can be essential. But my experiences led me to question something else:

Have we become more accustomed to identifying children's difficulties than to examining the conditions in which they are expected to learn?

I began recognising that the way we frame a problem shapes the solutions we consider.

When a child struggles in the classroom, we can approach the situation from two different but complementary perspectives.

Two perspectives, two sets of questions

Both perspectives are valuable.

The difficulty arises when one replaces the other rather than complementing it.

A child experiencing a mental health condition may genuinely need clinical care. But a child struggling to follow instructions, participate or concentrate does not necessarily have a clinical problem.

And even when a child requires specialist support, the educational question remains:

How do we help this child learn and participate alongside classmates?

What happens when we change the learning conditions?

During my work in schools, I observed children who appeared unwilling to participate or who became frustrated when activities were too difficult.

Sometimes the difficulty was not simply a lack of motivation.

The child might not have understood the instruction, might have lacked a foundational skill, or might have been expected to complete too much work before developing the ability to do so.

When I changed the conditions of the activity, clarifying instructions, reducing unnecessary complexity, adjusting the level of difficulty or providing appropriate opportunities to practise, I sometimes observed a very different response.

Children who had stopped participating began working again.

These experiences didn't lead me to conclude that every behavioural or learning difficulty could be resolved through educational adjustments.

They led me to ask a different question:

Before concluding what a child cannot do, have we sufficiently examined what we can change to help that child develop the capability?

Individual needs within a shared classroom

One of the greatest challenges teachers face is that children enter the classroom with different abilities, experiences and learning needs.

Yet education is not simply a collection of individual learning experiences occurring in the same room.

Children also need to learn together.

They need opportunities to listen, cooperate, respect differences, follow shared rules and develop friendships.

These experiences are part of education itself.

As I developed the Langford Method, I became increasingly interested in how children with different individual starting points could participate in a common, carefully organised learning experience and work towards the same learning goal.

The goal was not to make every child identical or eliminate individual support.

It was to consider how the learning environment could help more children participate with growing independence, while allowing teachers to provide additional support where necessary.

Understanding our different responsibilities

I believe we need a clearer conversation about the complementary responsibilities of the adults involved in children's development.

Teachers are responsible for organising learning experiences, teaching the curriculum, guiding classroom participation and observing how children respond. Their work necessarily involves both individual learners and the group.

Educational psychologists and learning specialists can help identify barriers to learning, understand children's educational needs and recommend practical strategies that teachers can put into practice, including appropriate individual adjustments.

Clinical psychologists and other health professionals assess and treat difficulties that require clinical expertise. Their contribution can be essential, particularly when developmental, emotional or mental health conditions affect a child's wellbeing and participation.

School leaders help create consistent expectations, supportive environments and opportunities for teachers and specialists to work together.

Families contribute through relationships, emotional security, values and experiences beyond the classroom. Parents should be partners in their children's development, but they should not be expected to compensate for every difficulty a child experiences in school by becoming additional academic teachers at home.

These responsibilities are not completely separate. Effective collaboration requires communication and flexibility.

Collaboration becomes more meaningful, though, when each professional contribution strengthens rather than replaces the others.

A question worth reconsidering

I sometimes wonder whether, in our efforts to provide increasingly specialised support, we risk paying less attention to the conditions that allow an entire classroom to learn together.

This is not an argument against assessment, diagnosis, inclusion measures or individual assistance.

It is an invitation to consider another dimension of our responsibility.

When a child struggles, identifying the difficulty is important. Understanding what can be changed in the learning experience is equally important.

The two questions should inform one another.

We should not have to choose between understanding a child's individual needs and creating an educational environment in which that child can develop capabilities and participate alongside others.

Perhaps one of the most useful questions we can ask is not only:

What difficulty does this child have?

But also:

What conditions can we create to help this child learn something they cannot yet do?