The Emotional and Mental Health Impact of Segregated Education

22 April 2026

Hard to define, but you know when you don’t have it – the feeling of belonging is essential to our emotional wellbeing. All young people do, or should, belong in our world and to each other.

Segregation and being moved to a separate education setting, makes the statement that some of us do not belong, makes us feel we are lesser humans and undermines our human need for connection.

Our educational needs mask our fundamental human need to belong and connect with other humans. Connection to others is a fundamental human need, connection gives us a feeling of belonging, of who we are as whole people not deficient in any way.

Fulfilment comes with being able to connect and contribute in the ways we can as who we are.

We all can contribute to the well-being of the whole, a family, classroom or anywhere else, but inclusion inevitably means wider range of student needs will be encountered.

Separation, through segregation, tells us we have nothing to give, leading to feelings of worthlessness and being a burden on society. Segregation is not just about physical separation. When we don’t get the support, or help, we need, even in the mainstream of life, we can feel the same disconnection, alienation and fear.

We can soon slip into not wanting to go out, to not wanting to make the effort to meet people, of feeling depressed or angry leading to more isolation.

Segregation creates a fearful society, and we Disabled people meet fear all the time.

This is another way of saying we are vulnerable to feeling unsafe. Part of the definition of feeling ‘safe’ in this context has to do with having someone make good choices for us when we can’t make them for ourselves. If this sounds vague, then that’s because it is vague. Much of the time you are making your best guess about what’s happening and you may need to make changes on the run whilst keeping the child’s trust – inevitably you’ll get it wrong.

When young people are separated from learning about and getting to know each other, Disabled people remain an alien mystery, a curiosity, people to study rather than be friends with. Mitigating the discomfort of those who we meet in the world, when they feel awkward around us, takes effort and skill both from ourselves and from those who assist us.

The constant work of allaying people’s fear can make us feel weird, whatever we believe about equality. Some children do act ‘weird’ – they baffle other children, and adults, not because others are uncaring or stupid but because they are just baffled.

Whilst seeming an attractive option to governments, schools and local authorities (LAs), there is no history or evidence to support units or special schools’ efficacy with regards to behaviour change, reintegration or inclusion within a mainstream school and community. The risks are of greater alienation, racism and lowered self-esteem. The learning of new, negative anti-social behaviour is very likely to lead to mental health, relationship and criminal behaviour problems, and that should be enough to deter the further development of this model of working.

However, the medical impulse is to call these baffling behaviours ‘inappropriate’ and thereby label children as ‘seriously emotionally disturbed’. The problem with this label is that it has pretensions to being a diagnostic category rather than the context dependent, socially constructed expedient it really is. No disability definition is, or ever could be, about a child alone. To say a child has a body weight of 25 kilograms says nothing about the scale used or the person who weighed the child. Describing a child as having an ‘inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers’, necessarily says something about those peers and teachers. This is why some settings are more successful at inclusion than others.

Precisely because there is no one answer, the challenge of engaging with difficult behaviour never ends. This work can never become stale or dull. Listening to students with difficult behaviour requires an attitude of openness, of looking from as many angles as it takes to develop a way forward. Inclusion is more of an attitude than a programme or a technology. For this reason, behaviourally based schemes almost always escalate punishments rather than rewards.

Our self-esteem can be fragile and when we can’t always get the help we need, we can feel not worthy of help.

The full inclusion of children with trauma, challenging behaviour and emotional needs is a significant challenge for many schools. Yet all schools would see it as fundamental to their vision to enhance the social and emotional development as well as the academic achievement of all students. There’s no one easy answer as to what works in deepening the meaning of inclusion for individuals with behavioural difficulties.

But we do know that nurturing and rational approaches work well.

Friendship, acceptance and belonging are fundamental to how we exist in the world, and to have love and friends, we have to connect with other people. We all need a wide range of experience of relating to others, including those whose behaviour is challenging.

To do this we have to share the same space to learn about each other and share who we are. This is another way of saying that this is what it takes to enable us to ‘flourish’.

To be at ease with ourselves, connection to others is surely the way out of anxiety and hurt self-esteem.