Consent or Coercion? When Parents Agree to Partial Days or Gradual Entry

 

Schools often frame it as a choice. They tell parents: Your child can’t attend full-time because we don’t have enough support. Then they press parents to agree, framing it as a joint decision. But this isn’t real collaboration. It is pressure disguised as partnership, a way to shift responsibility from the system onto families who feel they have no other option.

But let’s be clear, what parent would knowingly agree to send their child into an environment where they will struggle and fail? No one. Parents are not given a real choice. They are guilted, pressured, and cornered into accepting less than their child’s right: the right to a full day of education, alongside their peers.

And so enter the so-called “solutions”: partial-day attendance or gradual entry. On paper, these sound reasonable, perhaps even supportive. Let’s ease them in. Let’s protect them from overwhelm. But in reality, they rarely come from a place of individualized care. They come from a system that doesn’t want to be accountable. A system that knows if a child isn’t in school full-time, it doesn’t have to provide the staff, the accommodations, or the resources to make full-time possible.

In some cases, it is the lack of support that leads to behaviours deemed “unsafe.” At that point, the answer becomes a partial-day program, one that comes with endless hoops and hurdles the student must “achieve” before being allowed back full-time. The narrative shifts: dysregulation is now framed as the child’s problem, the reason they cannot attend. Few people stop to examine the conditions that created the dysregulation in the first place, the unmet needs, the overwhelming environment, the lack of accommodations. Instead of addressing root causes, responsibility is pushed onto the child. Parents are reminded, again and again, that they “agreed” to this plan and must follow through, as if exclusion is now their burden to carry.

These exclusions are often disguised behind “policies” that are hidden in each district. Sometimes there is a form to sign, sometimes an administrative policy to point to, but the rules vary widely from district to district. The inconsistency makes it incredibly difficult for parents to navigate or even know their rights. What looks like local discretion is really systemic avoidance, allowing districts to protect themselves while leaving families confused and isolated.

Partial days and gradual entry do not address barriers; they erase them from sight. They do not solve problems; they delay them. And all the while, the school can claim, We worked with the family. This was the agreed-upon plan. That paperwork lets the school off the hook. It absolves administrators of their duty to accommodate, because they can point to the parents’ “agreement” and say exclusion wasn’t imposed, it was “decided together.”

This is how systemic discrimination hides in plain sight. Families, under immense pressure, co-sign their child’s exclusion. They do it out of love, out of fear, out of the desperate need to protect their child from being set up to fail. But the end result is the same: the child loses access to education, the parent carries the guilt, and the school walks away without responsibility.

Here’s the truth: now more than ever, schools must be equipped to support the developmental variability of students. Period. Children arrive at school with diverse needs, strengths, and ways of learning. That is not the problem. The problem is when the system responds to this diversity by shrinking access instead of expanding support. A half day is not an accommodation. A gradual entry is not inclusion. These are shortcuts that protect the system, not the student.

Parents should never be asked to co-sign their child’s exclusion. That is not a partnership. That is coercion. And until schools stop hiding behind partial solutions and start taking full responsibility, students will continue to lose the very thing they are legally and morally entitled to: a full education.