A new research project to help bridge the educational gap in children with neurodevelopmental and disruptive behaviour conditions

A pioneering research programme led by Queen Mary University of London is tackling one of education's most pressing challenges: why children with neurodevelopmental and behavioural conditions continue to fall behind despite significant investment, and what can be done about it.

Published:

27 April 2026

How can we bridge the educational gap between neurodivergent and typically developing children? The number of children with special education needs has more than doubled since 2014. Despite major governmental investment over the last ten years, the educational experiences and outcomes of children with special needs have not improved. Students with special educational needs, including neurodivergent children and children with behavioural difficulties, don’t receive the support that they need, nor do their families, read the report here.

At the heart of this educational gap is the growing awareness of the complexity of special needs with many children meeting the criteria for more than one diagnosis. Many neurodivergent children and children with disruptive behaviour problems remain undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, often due to a lack of awareness and understanding of this complexity. Indeed, we still lack clear scientific evidence of which neurodevelopmental conditions —such as autism, ADHD and learning difficulties— and disruptive behaviour conditions —such as conduct problems and oppositional symptoms—tend to manifest together and why they do. This is a key priority if we wish to intervene to improve educational outcomes these children.

Our interdisciplinary team or researchers at Queen Mary University of London, University College London, including Giorgia Michelini and Jessica Agnew-Blais, and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health has developed a research programme to address these important issues. Our end goal is to pinpoint protective environments that can narrow the educational gap between children with different neurodivergent and behavioural profiles, a gap that is likely wider when multiple conditions co-occur. We recently received funding from the UKRI Medical Research Council to answer three core questions.

First, how often different neurodevelopmental and behavioural conditions occur together across childhood and adolescence? We will pay particular attention to conditions that have been previously overlooked in research settings, such as communication and motor difficulties and oppositional and impulsive aggression symptoms. We will use data collected as part of six large studies, altogether including hundreds of thousands of children in the UK, Norway and the Unites States, to understand how different neurodevelopmental and behavioural symptoms are connected. We will also explore how genetic factors may help explain these patterns of shared risk.

With this project, we want to move away from thinking about developmental conditions as separate entities –separate from one another and separate from typical development – and toward a more inclusive approach that recognises connections between conditions.

Second, what is impact that experiencing multiple symptoms of neurodevelopmental and disruptive behaviour conditions has on learning? Each neurodevelopmental and disruptive behaviour condition has been linked to a specific set of educational challenges. However, the observation that conditions are often connected creates a level of complexity that we don’t understand at present. We are working on quantifying the impact that multiple conditions have on learning, focusing on how the dynamic relationships between neurodiversity and educational outcomes unfold across development.

Third, to what extent genetic risk that is shared across multiple conditions works in interplay with environmental experiences? A major challenge in early interventions has been their focus on environmental experiences without considering evidence that environments work in combination with genetic disposition. This is particularly important when considering neurodevelopmental and disruptive behaviour conditions where we know genetic factors play a role. We also know that genetic differences can affect how children experience and respond to the environments around them.

We will study which environmental experiences – families, classrooms, and communities – combine with genetic risk to lead to differential learning outcomes for children and teenagers.

Our ultimate goal is to provide clinicians and educators with a complete view of which conditions are connected, when they start manifesting together during development and how they impact educational outcomes. We hope to identify good environmental targets for interventions —at home, in school, and more widely in the community—that can lead to the development of successful educational interventions to benefit students with special educational needs.

To find out more about our research you can watch this video: