Falling Through the Cracks: How Changes to BC’s Autism Funding May Affect Schools

Systems rarely operate in isolation. Health care, education, social services, and legal systems may appear separate on paper, but in reality, they are tightly interwoven. When policy shifts in one area, the effects ripple outward. The recent changes to British Columbia’s autism funding model are already being felt across the disability community. Much of the conversation has focused on how these changes will affect services for families. Far less attention has been paid to another question: what happens in schools?

I may be completely wrong, but based on what I have witnessed in a system where help and support are often pursued through the lens of diagnosis, it is difficult not to anticipate wider consequences from this decision. When access to resources has long been tied to diagnostic labels, changes to one system rarely stay contained. They move outward, reverberating through others, including our education system.

Children’s needs do not fit neatly into categories. Development is complex. Some students require more support during certain periods and less during others. Their needs fluctuate, evolve, and shift as they grow. Yet inclusive education funding in British Columbia is built on a far more rigid logic. Support is largely tied to diagnostic categories. A diagnosis is attached to a funding level. A label becomes a line item in a budget.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of ableist thinking embedded in policy, but this is the structure schools currently operate within.

For years, this system has quietly shaped how struggling students are identified. When children begin to have difficulty in school, the conversation often moves quickly toward formal assessment. Within British Columbia’s inclusive education funding model, many students are initially identified within high-incidence categories such as H (Intensive Behaviour Interventions or Serious Mental Illness) or R (Moderate Behaviour Support / Mental Illness). These categories acknowledge that a student requires additional support, but they bring relatively little targeted funding to a district compared to other designations. In practice, this means schools often struggle to provide the level of support students actually need under these categories. As a result, the conversation frequently shifts toward autism assessments. Families may be encouraged to pursue an autism diagnosis, not necessarily because autism fully explains the child’s experience, but because that designation brings significantly more funding into the system.

What often goes unspoken in this process is that many students temporarily sit within category H while families pursue further assessments. In practice, the designation can become a kind of holding place while schools wait for a diagnosis that may unlock greater funding. Yet the child’s needs existed long before any assessment began. The learning challenges, regulation difficulties, and communication differences are already present in the classroom. None of these suddenly appear once a report is written. The diagnosis simply makes those needs financially visible within the system, even though the needs themselves are there regardless.

Parents understand this dynamic as well. Many pursue assessments not because they are seeking a label, but because they are seeking support. Autism diagnoses have historically opened doors to both school-based resources and provincial autism funding. For many families, it has been one of the only pathways to meaningful help.

Recent changes to the autism funding model may disrupt that calculation.

For families whose children sit in the grey areas of development, the lengthy and sometimes expensive process of pursuing an autism assessment may no longer feel worthwhile. And in truth, a diagnosis should never be pursued simply as a funding mechanism. In a system grounded in human rights, support would be tied to need, not diagnostic eligibility.

But that is not the system we have built.

If fewer families pursue autism diagnoses, the consequences will extend beyond the medical system. School districts receive significant portions of their inclusive education funding based on the number of students identified within certain diagnostic categories. If the number of autism diagnoses declines, the funding attached to those designations may decline as well.

The problem is that the students themselves do not disappear.

The needs remain in classrooms. The sensory differences, learning challenges, communication barriers, and regulation struggles remain. What disappears is the bureaucratic justification that unlocks the funding.

And when that happens, the system begins to default to the explanation it has relied on for decades: there simply aren’t enough resources.

Students who fall outside clearly defined categories will once again become the easiest to overlook. They will be described as not qualifying, not severe enough, or not meeting criteria. Meanwhile, teachers will continue trying to support increasingly complex classrooms with fewer structural supports behind them.

These are the children most likely to fall through the cracks.

Ironically, the government’s attempt to address inequities in autism funding may have unintentionally exposed a deeper structural problem in the education system. When support is tied to diagnostic labels rather than actual need, policy changes in one system can destabilize support in another.

The real issue has never been the diagnosis.

The issue is a funding structure that treats human development as a set of boxes to be checked rather than a spectrum of needs to be supported.

Until schools move toward a human rights–based model of inclusion, where support is grounded in the duty to accommodate rather than diagnostic categories, these cracks will remain. Policy reforms may shift where the pressure falls, but the structural gaps will continue to widen.

And once again, it will be the children whose needs do not fit neatly into the system’s categories who fall first.