The Guardian has reported that Ofsted's has decided to drop guidance linking autism with susceptibility to extremism.

First, congratulations are due to those campaigners, including Chris Packham, Paul Whitehouse and others, who challenged what was a deeply flawed piece of official thinking. They were right to do so. But there is a wider issue here.

People who are described as neurodivergent are, almost by definition, extremists in the eyes of those who think the world as it is should remain largely unchanged.

Why? Because many such people question assumptions that others accept without a second thought. They spot inconsistencies. They see patterns that others miss. They notice flaws in systems that most people have learned to live with. And, very often, they want to put those flaws right. That is not extremism. It is critical thinking.

The problem is that institutions frequently regard anyone who challenges established ways of doing things as somehow difficult, disruptive or outside the norm. If your ambition is to preserve existing power structures, then anyone who persistently asks awkward questions can appear to be an extremist, just by deviating from the mean that they have chosen to define. Never has a standard deviation been so misinterpreted.

History suggests the opposite. Many of the people who have driven scientific, social and political progress have done so because they refused to accept that prevailing assumptions were correct. Had they simply fitted in, little would ever have changed.

The danger in Ofsted's abandoned guidance was not simply that it risked stigmatising autistic and ADHD children. It was that it confused independent thought with radicalisation. Those are not the same thing.

A healthy democracy depends upon people who question, analyse, challenge and imagine better alternatives. We should be encouraging those qualities, wherever they are found, not treating them as warning signs.

These people are the canaries in the mine. They are the ones who deliver the signal that something is wrong, and we need to act. Their way of thinking is not deviant, divergent or abnormal. It is just different, and valuable for precisely that reason.

The real risk to society is not that some people think differently. It is that too many people stop thinking differently at all.

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