by Rosalie Warnock and Katherine Brickell, King’s College London
Imagine trying to fight for SEN support for your child while struggling with being homeless at the same time…
You and your three children became homeless two months ago. The bright lights, smells and noise in the hotel room your family shares are too much for your neurodivergent child, who is extremely dysregulated. They can’t go to school because the 10-minute walk is now an hour by public transport, and they can’t cope with buses. This means you can’t get your other children to school either, so you’re caring for all three of them in one room, 24/7.
You’re not allowed guests in the hotel, so no one can help you out. Your child has a restricted diet, but you’re only allowed a kettle in your hotel room – no microwave, hotplate, fridge or freezer. This means your child is surviving on cheese sandwiches from the local corner shop. On top of that, the long-awaited appointment letter for their autism assessment was sent to your previous address, so you missed it, and now they are at the bottom of the waiting list again…
This is the reality of life in temporary accommodation for many neurodivergent children and their families.
Temporary accommodation (TA) is an all-encompassing term covering rooms in hotels and B&Bs, in short-term houses of multiple occupation (HMOs), flats, or in other emerging forms of TA, including converted office blocks and shipping containers. When a family (or single person) presents as homeless to their local authority, they will be placed in TA (the Home Office also administers TA for asylum-seeking families). In theory, there is a statutory six-week limit to how long children can stay in a TA hotel, but in practice, children are spending months, years, or even their entire childhood in various forms of TA.
How widespread is the current situation?
165,510 children are currently homeless and living in TA in England alone. That is enough to fill the 02 Arena over eight times. In London, where rates are some of the highest, 1 in 21 children are homeless. That’s at least one child in every school class. Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary Angela Raynor, has called this a “national scandal”.
Crucially, however, there is no data on the number or experiences of neurodivergent children living in temporary accommodation. What we do know is that living in TA is likely to be especially challenging for neurodivergent children due to sensory and communication difficulties, unpredictable and often frequent changes to routine, and the challenges of accessing SEND services and healthcare as families are moved between local authority areas and on and off waiting lists for support.
Sensory Lives project— call for evidence
Our new Sensory Lives project aims to highlight and fill this gap in understanding neurodivergent children’s specific experiences of living in TA. Running between January 2025 and December 2026, the project is a partnership between King’s College London and the Shared Health Foundation in Oldham, Greater Manchester. Using neuro-inclusive, child-friendly research methods, we hope to bring neurodivergent children’s voices into debates about how to address the scandal of family homelessness.
Today (Monday 19th May 2025), in partnership with the All Party Parliamentary Group on Households in Temporary Accommodation, Shared Health Foundation, and the charity, Autistica, we have also launched a first-of-its-kind national call for evidence on life in temporary accommodation for families in the UK with a neurodivergent child. The findings will be launched in Westminster via the APPG on Households in Temporary Accommodation in late 2025 / early 2026.
Because it’s the first time this data will be collected, it’s really important to gather as many, and as varied, stories and experiences as we can. If you:
- have experience living in temporary accommodation with a neurodivergent child,
- know someone who does, or,
- you work to support homeless families with neurodivergent children, we want to hear from you! Your child can have a formal diagnosis of a neurodivergent condition/s, or you may suspect the are neurodivergent – either is fine*. You can submit written evidence, voice notes, or photos.
You can find out more about the call and submit your evidence anonymously – by following this link. The call runs for five weeks between 19 May and 20 June 2025. We look forward to keeping the Special Needs Jungle community updated on the project’s progress!
How we define neurodiversity for the project
*How are we defining ‘neurodivergence’?
Neurodivergence is a community-developed term that describes “a group of people whose ways of processing information, behaving, and experiencing the environment differs from the neurotypical majority” (Autistica, 2024, p.4). It is often associated with (but is not restricted to) autism, attention deficit disorder/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD), dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette’s Syndrome, sensory processing disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
We recognise that people have differing opinions on what should or should not be included under this label. Some people may self-identify as neurodivergent with or without a formal (medical) diagnosis of a condition typically understood to fall under the neurodivergent umbrella. Others might choose not to use the neurodiversity label at all. Our research is still open to people who do not identify with the neurodivergent label, but do identify as being autistic, for example. Because we know how hard it is to get a diagnostic assessment, our research is also open to people who suspect their child is neurodivergent and may (or may not yet) be on a waiting list for a formal assessment.
About the authors:
Dr Rosalie Warnock is a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. She has eight years’ research experience on everyday neurodiverse family lives, care, austerity welfare reform, and inequality in the UK. Her PhD research examined how parents and carers of autistic children navigate and access SEND and social security support services in London. You can find out more here. She has worked in a research capacity with marginalised parents and carers across the UK (London, Yorkshire, and online), and as a youth support worker with young autistic people in Oxford.
Rosalie’s role on the Sensory Lives project is to develop ways of working inclusively with neurodivergent children and their families and to translate these lived experiences into calls for participant-led policy change. Rosalie is leading the national call for evidence.
Professor Katherine Brickell is Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Katherine has two decades of research experience examining gendered dynamics and inequalities of domestic life, and has long-standing expertise of working in partnership with local and international organisations to enhance the real-world impact of her collaborative research. Her latest research, with Mel Nowicki and the Shared Health Foundation in Greater Manchester, examined the interconnections between debt, family homelessness, and TA in England. Katherine and Mel’s research report The Debt Trap was launched at the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation in October 2023.
Katherine leads the Sensory Lives project and is responsible for building dialogue and action on the findings of the project through the playhouse tent and broader policy engagement to enact positive change for families.
If you have any questions about it, please feel free to email katherine.brickell@kcl.ac.uk
Also read:
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- “Lack of stigma” blamed for rising SEND? We will NEVER be ashamed of our disabled children
- Hey mum, you’re autistic too! Me, my kids and my adult autism diagnosis
- Ten Top tips for when your child is diagnosed with a rare disease
- Researching flexi-schooling: How beneficial is it for children with SEND?
- Oops, we did it again… The Government must now listen to more than 100,000 people who do not want to lose SEND rights
- Experts at Hand: When is an occupational therapist also a SEND expert?
- Could using AI to filter Government consultation responses lead to “algorithmic silencing” of neurodivergent voices?
- A council’s “improvement journey”? How determined SEND parents catalogued the trail of their LA’s unlawful behaviour
- Research: Social networks in special schools. Friendships, bullying and play
- CrowdJustice SEND accountability: When the law says “must”, local authorities cannot treat it as “maybe”
- DfE must give its SEND reform Child Rights Impact Assessment a do-over; this time, without marking its own homework
- Research: SEND case officers are LAs’ “human shield” gatekeepers. But parents shouldn’t have to be their own key workers
- Research finds the Government’s SEND National Conversation “performative”, lacking pathways for young people’s inclusion
- EOTAS: Why the Government must listen to those with lived experience
- Beyond EHCPs: Why Inclusion Needs More Than a Document
What kind of government is “bold” enough to scrap statutory EHCPs from vulnerable children?May 16, 2025EHCP
The SEND reforms in the Schools White Paper reveal rights given, and rights stripped awayFebruary 24, 2026Schools White Paper
ADHD and Autism Right To Choose referrals paused as at least nine NHS areas tell providers to stop booking assessmentsNovember 28, 2025ADD_ADHD
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- Researching flexi-schooling: How beneficial is it for children with SEND? - October 5, 2026
- Experts at Hand: When is an occupational therapist also a SEND expert? - September 30, 2026
- A council’s “improvement journey”? How determined SEND parents catalogued the trail of their LA’s unlawful behaviour - September 29, 2026
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