09/19/2025
I cringe when I hear schools taking away recess and breaks as punishment for behavior. Yes kids need appropriate consequences but taking away breaks and recess for a neurodivergent kid, or any kid really, is like pouring gasoline on a fire and telling it to stop burning. Play and movement regulates the nervous system.
Across the UK, schools frequently use playtime or break time as a behavioural lever. This practice is harmful, inequitable and out of step with both evidence and UK law.
Breaks should never be treated as rewards. They are developmental and legal necessities. And for neurodivergent children, whose needs for sensory regulation, movement and downtime are often greater, the stakes are even higher.
1. What breaks do for children
Far from being time off learning, breaks are part of learning. Evidence shows:
Cognitive benefits – children return from breaks with renewed attention and better focus. The breaks help the brain produce dopamine and reduce anxiety exacerbated by such a controlled environment.
Physical health – breaks provide essential daily movement and are a powerful and effective way to support self-regulation.
Mental health – breaks allow stress release, downtime and emotional processing.
These functions are especially important for neurodivergent students, many of whom face additional barriers in educational environments.
2. Treating break time as a reward is problematic
A basic need becomes conditional. Neurodivergent children often require more frequent sensory and movement breaks, thus making these contingent on compliance effectively punishes them for their neurology.
From an equity perspective the children who need the breaks most, are denied it most often since neurodivergent students are more likely to struggle with rigid expectations and demands, therefore more likely to lose their break.
It’s also worth mentioning that neurodivergent students, who may already experience authority figures as unpredictable, learn that adults control even their basic needs, which increases their anxiety and makes them even less likely to build trusting relationships with their teachers.
Needless to say, it backfires. Preventing neurodivergent students from self-regulating increases the very behaviours that staff are trying to reduce. Quite the irony… the very strategy intended to enforce compliance (oh, how keen they are on compliance!) actually undermines it, especially for those whose neurology requires a different kind of support. By removing break time, schools strip away one of the few protective buffers the children have to reset and recalibrate.
3. Withholding breaks as punishment is harmful
Removing break time as a form of punishment rarely achieves its intended outcome and for neurodivergent students, the consequences are especially damaging.
Breaks are essential and should be non-negotiable. These moments of downtime provide the chance to decompress from sensory overload, release physical energy and reset emotionally. Without them, stress accumulates. What might begin as mild discomfort can quickly spiral into full dysregulation, making it harder for students to concentrate, communicate and remain in the classroom safely.
Then there’s the social impact. Breaks offer a rare opportunity to connect with others in a more flexible, self-directed way, albeit on their terms.
Let's not forget the legal aspect. Legally, the practice raises serious concerns. Under the Equality Act 2010, schools have a duty to avoid policies or actions that place disabled students, which includes neurodivergent children, at a substantial disadvantage. When break time is withheld as a standard consequence, those most in need of that regulatory space are the most likely to lose it. The evidence clearly shows this approach causes harm meaning it is not only inequitable, but also unlawful.
Removing breaks doesn’t punish children for poor choices or behaviours, but for unmet needs. The very needs that schools have a legal and moral obligation to accommodate.
4. The adult parallel: UK Law on rest breaks
The UK’s Working Time Regulations 1998 guarantee that any worker over 18 working more than six hours is entitled to a 20-minute minimum uninterrupted rest break. This is a health and safety protection.
Adults cannot lawfully be denied breaks, regardless of performance or behaviours, yet children are denied the same protection.
If adults are legally entitled to rest, it is inconsistent and ethically troubling to deny children, particularly neurodivergent children with higher regulatory needs, their own essential breaks.
There are a lot of ethical and educational contradictions, aren't there? Protecting breaks is protecting children. Removing access to these is educationally unsound, ethically questionable and more so discriminatory.
Breaks should never be treated as optional extras and using them as leverage is disproportionately harmful for neurodivergent students. The implications and ramifications are far too great.
If the law requires adults to have breaks, schools must ensure children are guaranteed theirs. Breaks must be protected, not conditioned.
