The School
The School of Abnormal
This is our normal. If it looks abnormal to you, we are comfortable with that.
Why call a school The School of Abnormal?
In 1910 Spain created a national council for children it described as abnormal. Children who learned differently, moved differently, questioned too much or did not fit the classroom were sorted, measured and managed from the top down.
Look at who would have been placed in that category. The boy who argued with his teachers and spent his time drawing what he saw under a microscope. The girl who wanted all the information and began to think for herself. Children who were curious in the wrong direction, imaginative at the wrong moment, or simply learning in a way the system had not planned for.
Many of the people we meet today would have been classed as abnormal by that first school. Many of the people we learn from most are exactly those people.
The School of Abnormal starts from them.
Our normal
We do not set out to be abnormal. We live our normal. We learn in the way that works for us, follow our curiosity, notice details others pass by, and imagine things that do not exist yet.
To someone else, that normal can look abnormal.
When someone says, "That is not normal," we can answer with a question: "Who decided?" And if they still want to call us abnormal, we are comfortable with that. It means we get to be different. We get to stay curious. We get to keep our imagination.
The word loses its power to correct us once we stop needing it to be untrue.
Doing things differently
The School of Abnormal is a place for doing things differently, openly and on purpose.
Learning differently. We teach Whole System Neuro-Endocrinology from the person outward and from the cell upward. A learner may begin with a glial cell drawn as a jellyfish, a rockpool, a photograph, a hormone, or a question from their own life. Observation comes before explanation. Every section ends with questions for reflection, and the learner's own experience is treated as information worth investigating. Slowness is allowed. Wandering off into a connection is allowed. That is often where the understanding lives.
Interviewing differently. Through The Sessions, a conversation is led by curiosity about the person. We ask how they experience their own normal and what others have called abnormal about it. The person shapes the conversation, checks their words before publication, and keeps ownership of their story. Your stories become education.
Investigating differently. We bring the same curiosity to institutions that we bring to people. We ask how a rule was chosen, who it was built for, and who it left out.
A school that holds others to account
Imagination and curiosity are where learning begins. Some institutions believe they are building good education by producing normal, and they do it by removing the very things that build imagination and curiosity. The School of Abnormal builds accountability for that.
We look closely at three patterns.
Removing imagination and curiosity in the name of normal. Timetables with no room to wonder. Questions treated as disruption. Interests that are confiscated, discouraged or timed out. Learning paths that allow one direction only. We ask what each of these removes, and what a child or adult loses when it is gone.
Using "expert" in place of ongoing learning. A title, a qualification or a past diagnosis can be used to close a conversation that should stay open. Expertise carries knowledge and responsibility. It also carries the duty to keep learning, to examine new evidence, and to listen when the person in front of you explains something the framework missed. When "the expert has decided" ends the inquiry, learning has stopped.
Using coercive tactics to stop the actions of others. Pressure, threat, exclusion, withholding, or repeated judgement can be used to stop a person from asking, moving, speaking or choosing. Over time a person may begin to stop themselves before anyone else has to. We investigate where that pressure came from and keep responsibility with the person or system that applied it. A person's learned holding back is protection of self, and it should never be confused with the intent of whoever caused it.
Our method is careful: listen, verify, request a response, review, publish carefully, follow up. Examples are framed as questions until facts are documented, and every institution is offered a right of reply. We apply the same accountability to ourselves.
Three forms of pressure we investigate
Between people. Someone uses standards of normal, acceptable or successful to influence what another person does. The relationship and the actual consequences shape whether that behaviour is coercive.
Within oneself. Someone learns to anticipate criticism and starts applying outside expectations to themselves. What once needed another person's warning becomes an internal instruction: keep quiet, hide that interest, change that reaction, avoid that question.
Within institutions. Timetables, policies, diagnostic frameworks, assessment systems and professional habits can set expectations that leave little room for individual circumstances. We ask how those expectations were chosen and how they can be questioned.
These can overlap. Permission Architecture explores, as a developing hypothesis, how behaviour may be permitted, inhibited, shaped, released or blocked across all three.
The pleasure of difference
Being different should never require proof of extraordinary intelligence, talent or achievement.
A person can enjoy a particular sensory experience, a way of thinking, a pattern of sleep, a deep interest, a preference for solitude, an unusual conversation or a creative approach to a familiar problem. They can also find parts of life hard and want support.
Enjoyment, need, strength and difficulty can exist together.
Difference is worth exploring even when nobody turns it into a success story.
The School and Brilliantly Unbalanced
The School of Abnormal sits within Brilliantly Unbalanced, and every course is taught through it. It holds three subjects:
- Understanding Burnout in its many forms, built from Whole System Neuro-Endocrinology and Permission Architecture.
- Whole System Neuro-Endocrinology, where each person is investigated as an ecosystem, from receptors and cells to hormones, the body, relationships and the places they live.
- The Sessions, lived experience, conversations and interviews.
Permission Architecture runs through all of them: human action is not only chosen. It may also be permitted, shaped, blocked or released through whole-system biological architecture.
The Council of Abnormal, in development
We are exploring a future Council of Abnormal: a participatory space where people with lived experience, pupils, educators, researchers and parents examine questions together and challenge one another's assumptions. Its role, membership, safeguarding and independence will be designed openly. It does not yet exist as a formal body and has no regulatory authority.
Where the school stands today
The School of Abnormal is an independent educational research, interview and publishing initiative in development. It is not currently an accredited school offering state-recognised enrolment, a statutory inspectorate, or a substitute for professional complaints bodies.
Its starting point is simple. Be curious. Learn differently. Provide evidence. Listen carefully. Stay willing to be questioned.
Curiosity before conclusion. People are my rockpools.