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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 of which are 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 is something that can be built into systems, rather than left to families to construct alone under pressure. The Coherence Navigation Framework (CNF) was developed from independent qualitative research with 50 participants across Scotland: 30 family members and 20 professionals from NHS, local authority, education, and third sector settings. Thematic analysis identified three conditions that determine 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. Supported navigation, where families receive structured guidance rather than repeated redirection. The CNF is an emerging, 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 real conditions under which educational outcomes improve for neurodivergent children. Coherence is not a soft ambition. It is a design requirement.
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Conference: ECE2026Stream: Education & Difference: Gifted Education
This paper is part of the ECE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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