Abstract
<p>Despite sustained policy effort, neurodivergent children and young people continue toexperience significantly poorer educational outcomes than their peers. This paperargues that the persistence of this inequity reflects a fundamental conceptual limitationwithin the diagnosis-dependent framework that organises educational support inEngland. Specifically, existing approaches continue to treat educational need as aproperty of individuals, despite convergent evidence from neuroscience,developmental psychology, disability studies, and educational philosophy showingthat need is relational, contextual, and dynamic.Drawing together insights from the neurodiversity paradigm, transdiagnostic research,the capability approach, and the World Health Organization's InternationalClassification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), we develop a novel,theoretically integrated framework for understanding and responding to educationalneed, moving beyond both diagnostic and deficit-based models to offer a coherentconceptual foundation for a genuinely needs-led approach to educational support.We elaborate this framework across four interconnected domains: assessment andidentification, workforce development, learning environments and curriculum, andfunding and accountability. Through systematic interdisciplinary synthesis, wedemonstrate how a needs-led approach can reshape not only educational policy andpractice, but also future research agendas.</p>