Unseen in the Classroom
Neurodevelopmental disorders and the identification gap in India's K–12 school system — Cortical's founding research brief.
India's K–12 school system serves over 250 million children. Among them, a significant and systematically undercounted proportion live with neurodevelopmental disorders — conditions including autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, dyslexia, and developmental coordination disorder — that affect how they learn, communicate, and participate in school life. The majority are never identified. Of those who are, most receive their diagnosis years after the window for early intervention has closed.
This brief documents that gap. It does not argue that the gap exists — that is already established in the international literature. It asks, with specificity, why it persists in India's school system, what structural features of identification, accommodation, and policy have allowed it to persist, and what a credible response would require.
01 — The Identification GapThe Identification Gap
Identification of neurodevelopmental disorders in India's school system is systematically late and structurally uneven. The gap is not primarily one of awareness — teachers, parents, and school administrators often notice that a child is struggling. The gap is between noticing and acting: between a teacher observing that a student cannot follow written instructions and a trained professional assessing that child for dyslexia; between a parent observing social withdrawal and a paediatrician evaluating for autism spectrum disorder.
The structural barriers are multiple. Trained professionals are concentrated in urban centres. Assessment tools validated for Indian linguistic and cultural contexts remain scarce. School counsellors, where they exist, are typically not trained in NDD identification. And the referral pathways between schools, families, and healthcare providers are informal, inconsistent, and dependent on individual initiative rather than institutional design.
The gap is not between awareness and knowledge — it is between knowledge and the institutional capacity to act on it. That is the gap Cortical's research is designed to map.
Accommodation Failures
For children who are identified, the accommodation landscape is fragmented. Provisions exist in policy — the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (2016) and the National Education Policy (2020) both contain relevant language — but their implementation in school-level practice is uneven at best. Schools lack the trained personnel to design individualised accommodation plans. Teachers receive no systematic pre-service training in NDD-related pedagogy. And the accountability mechanisms for accommodation compliance are absent.
The result is that identification, where it occurs, does not reliably translate into meaningful support. A child with a documented diagnosis may receive extra time in examinations and nothing else. The gap between policy provision and classroom practice is wide, and it is widest for children in non-elite, non-urban school settings.
Policy Architecture
The policy framework is present but implementation is the gap. Three specific structural absences recur in Cortical's research: first, the absence of mandatory NDD-specific training in teacher education programmes; second, the absence of school-level data collection on NDD prevalence and accommodation compliance that would make the gap legible to policymakers; and third, the absence of a funded referral pathway that connects school observation to professional assessment without requiring families to navigate the system individually.
Internationally, the frameworks exist. SDG 4 commits India to inclusive education for all. The CRPD, ratified by India in 2007, establishes binding obligations for reasonable accommodation in educational settings. The gap is not a gap in framework — it is a gap in implementation architecture.
Cortical's recommendation is not a comprehensive policy redesign. It is specific, scoped, and deliverable within the existing institutional architecture. Three actions: mandatory NDD awareness training integrated into teacher education; a school-level data collection requirement on identification and accommodation rates; and a funded referral pathway connecting school observation to professional assessment, piloted first in Cortical's partner school network.
Supervised by the founding research advisor at Huron University College, Western University, and conducted in partnership with K–12 school communities across India, this brief represents Cortical's first contribution to the evidence base on which better policy can be built. It is not the last word. It is the first one.