Does every child need to have a label to distinguish it from the crowd?

It appears so, for the child with no label is becoming a rare creature indeed.

They have learning difficulties, or anger issues, or ADHD, or autism, or they’re obese, or anorexic, or have an allergy, or something.

Do labels help children? No, in my opinion.

Take behavioural problems. In previous generations, children whose behaviour was disruptive were sent to ‘special’ schools, where they were educated with similar children. Now all children, apart from those with profound difficulties such as deafness and blindness, are educated together and so those with a label stand out from the crowd.

In a mainstream school, they are set apart in a different way, but also in a far more public way. Everyone in the school knows which children are educated under special circumstances, whereas children who attended a ‘special’ school were able to keep the circumstances of their education secret from their peers.

They didn’t have to tell anyone where they went to school, but now it’s common knowledge. The intention behind moving children with behavioural problems into mainstream education was to reduce the stigma of attending a ‘special’ school but the alternative seems to be far worse for them.

It doesn’t seem fair to me that children diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and autism cannot be dealt with by specialists in a separate institution.

Both the children and the school are suffering: the children because they need to be taught by specialist teachers, not mainstream teachers with a bit of extra training, and school budgets are coming under increasing pressure to provide specialist care and help at the expense of the rest of their pupils.

By the way, could the explosion in the number of children ‘diagnosed’ with ADHD in the past couple of decades possibly be related to the reduction in the amount of time allocated to free time in the school timetable?

When I was at secondary school, the school day began at 9am and ended at 4pm (that’s a seven-hour day), and included 20-minute breaks in the morning and afternoon, plus a lunchtime of an hour and 20 minutes.

That adds up to a total of two hours away from lessons, with breaks at regular intervals.

Today, school begins at 8.30am and ends at 3pm (six and a half hours), and includes one 15-minute break in the morning and a lunch break of 40 minutes. That’s less than an hour away from lessons.

And the length of lunch break is crucial: the old timetable allowed children to spend, say, 20 minutes to half an hour having lunch, with around another hour free to expend their energies outside, playing football, running around, whatever.

The current timetable, while it gives schoolchildren a shorter day, coops them up for much longer, forcing them to sit still for longer periods of time when they are not physically designed to do that. And then when they get home, they spend hours cooped up in front of screens.

No wonder they have ADHD in increasing numbers.

Last week, it was reported that middle-class children are being starved because their parents are too keen to label them as having an allergy.

They are putting them on restrictive diets that starve them of essential foods after testing their children with home-testing kits that have no scientific basis, according to scientists including those from the British Society for Immunology.

It’s frightening, because if it is done in the privacy of a family home, there is no control on the parent inflicting this on their child until they begin to suffer some sort of ill health as a result.

But one of the other side effects is that there are now so many people who apparently have allergies that society has become cynical and no longer takes those with real allergies seriously.

I think this cynicism problem is going to become more widespread as more and more children are given labels. Both parents and institutions are too eager to stick a label on a child, but it puts them in a box they find it hard to escape from. A label is put into the child’s file and remains there for years, passed on from school to school, school to college, college to employer, and so on, just like a criminal conviction.

You can’t peel away the label easily, even if the original condition is cured or heals by itself. In the digital age, it will stick to your child for life, so we should be very careful about how we label them, if at all.