‘I have it, so I understand it, I feel it’: The secondary school experiences of adolescent females with ADHD in England

Abstract

This research explores how adolescent females who have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience secondary education in England and make sense of their identity. Within schools, responsibility for supporting this population is placed in the hands of teachers, though prior research suggests that teachers feel underconfident in their ability to do so. Informed by a notion from the disability rights movement ‘nothing about us, without us’ (Charlton, Nothing about us without us: disability oppression and empowerment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), this study places the voice of people with ADHD at the centre of research. Using an interpretivist approach, qualitative data was gathered through unstructured interviews with five participants and was analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Findings suggested that participants' experiences of education and identity formation were shaped by internal cognitive differences in skills relating to executive function (EF) and sensory differences. The implications of social construction of the ADHD label had an impact, both on how participants understood their identities, and how teaching staff were reported to respond to ADHD-traits which participants felt they had little control over. Participants reported differences in their perceived ability to self-advocate and described experiences of attempting to adapt their ADHD-traits to reduce the risk of social or educational sanction in response to their differences.