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Azibaolanari Okungbowa, Independent Scholar, United KingdomAbstract
When a child has additional support needs, their education does not happen in a classroom alone. It happens across a system: health appointments, local authority decisions, education plans, and third sector support, all supposed to connect. In Scotland, they frequently do not. Families fill the gaps. Children wait. This paper argues that fragmentation in multi-agency educational support is not primarily a resource problem, it is a coherence problem, and coherence can be built into systems, rather than left to families to construct alone under pressure. The Coherence Navigation Framework (CNF) drew on Phase 1 research with 50 formally recruited participants across five stakeholder groups in Scotland, generating over 85 interview and focus group contributions, plus a separate 50-response anonymous survey. Thematic analysis identified three conditions determining whether support pathways hold together for the children at their centre: shared navigation, where coordination is distributed across the system rather than absorbed quietly by families; visible navigation, where progress and gaps are transparent to all relevant parties; and supported navigation, where families receive structured guidance rather than repeated redirection. The CNF is an original contribution to understanding coordination failure in neurodivergent support systems, with implications for education, health, and social care policy. It responds directly to Scotland's Additional Support for Learning Review (McManus, 2026) and contributes to interdisciplinary literature on inclusive education, integrated support design, and the conditions under which educational outcomes improve for neurodivergent children. Coherence is not a soft ambition. It is a design requirement.
Paper Information
Conference: ECE2026Stream: Education & Difference: Gifted Education
Published: Wednesday, September 23, 2026
This paper is part of the ECE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Okungbowa A. (2026) Coherence as a Coordination Problem: The Coherence Navigation Framework for Multi-agency Support in Neurodivergent Children’s Education ISSN: 2188-1162 The European Conference on Education 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 759-768) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2026.58
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2026.58
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