Almost 160,000 children were prescribed ADHD drugs last year alone

Britain is "medicalising childhood" as record numbers of children are prescribed ADHD medication, an education expert has warned.

New NHS figures show almost 160,000 children were prescribed ADHD medication last year - a 17 per cent increase in 12 months - while the number of adults receiving the drugs soared by 40 per cent.

But Dave Clements, author of Crisis in the Classrooms, warns experts are too quick to look for diagnostic labels rather than fully understand why children are struggling.

The former school governor, whose own son has been diagnosed with autism and ADHD, said: "We can't go on like this."

His warning comes as the latest Medicines Used in Mental Health figures, published this week by the NHS Business Services Authority, reveal there were 4.2 million drugs for ADHD prescribed in 2025-26.

An estimated 267,000 adults were prescribed ADHD medication during the year, up from 190,000 in the previous 12 months, while the number of children receiving the drugs rose by 17 per cent to 158,000.

NHS England estimates around 2.49 million people may have ADHD, including those without a diagnosis, while more than 803,000 people had open referrals that may have been for an ADHD assessment by March this year.

Mr Clements said the growing numbers reflected a system increasingly driven towards diagnosis rather than understanding why children were struggling in the first place.

"I think we tend to look for labels," he told the Care Visions podcast, produced by the children’s residential homes firm Care Visions and released next Wednesday.

"We want to explain away children's problems by medicalising them.

"I don't think that's helpful for most children. I think for most children there are likely to be other explanations."

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He stressed he was not questioning the reality of ADHD or autism and said many children with significant needs still struggle to receive the help they deserve.

"I think there's a large group of children who are still not getting the support they require and who may not have a diagnosis," he said.

"But there are other children who are being diagnosed with conditions, and it isn't necessarily helping them."

Instead, he argues schools and parents have increasingly been pushed towards seeking diagnoses because they have become the gateway to desperately needed support.

"I think schools and parents alike are chasing resources," he said.

"Sometimes those resources come with defining children with a set of needs."

He said this had created "perverse incentives" throughout the education system.

"If a child qualifies for extra support through an Education, Health and Care Plan, there's some more money that comes with that," he said, adding that schools under financial pressure often had little choice but to pursue that route.

Mr Clements believes the result is a system overwhelmed by demand, leaving children with the most complex needs competing for increasingly scarce resources.

"The bulk of children who are going through this process are crowding out the resources that are available."

He said this leaves genuinely vulnerable children facing long waits for assessments and support while local authorities struggle to cope with soaring demand.

His concerns echo findings from the Government's own independent review into ADHD, autism and mental health services.

The interim report, published in March after ministers launched the review last December, concluded that diagnoses are "increasingly being used to secure support" and that education systems are "not merely responding to diagnosis, but are also shaping demand for it".

It warned that a growing "medicalisation of distress" means a diagnosis can become the "main route of support", even where alternative responses may be more appropriate.

The review also suggested that behaviours in children once regarded as "within the range of normal variation" are now more often interpreted as requiring intervention or treatment.

Mr Clements said Britain needed to rethink how it supports children before even more families become trapped in a system that is struggling to cope.

"We're getting confused as a society about how to understand those different problems," he said.