About Nicola
I’ve spent years on both sides of the school meeting table.
My background spans around 25 years in education, with close to half of my teaching career in neurodivergent and gifted education. I also know this from the parent side, trying to make sense of school, reports, ability and difficulty for a profoundly gifted neurodivergent child. Those two perspectives are inseparable in how I work now.
Qualifications and professional development
Bachelor of Primary Education (B Prim Ed), University of the Witwatersrand, 2002.
Professional registration: South African Council for Educators (SACE), currently registered.
Continuing professional development: Managing ADHD, Autism, Learning Disabilities, and Concussion in School, University of Colorado System, 2025 (course certificate).
Experience: Around 25 years in education, including approximately a decade in gifted education and work with neurodivergent and twice-exceptional learners.
Teacher first
My professional background is in primary education, gifted education and learning support. Teaching taught me how much information a classroom gives you when you know what to look for: the child who understands the concept but cannot organise the output, the child whose behaviour changes when the task demand changes, the learner whose ability is obvious in conversation but much harder to see on paper.
It also taught me that schools work inside real constraints. Teachers have classes, timetables, curriculum demands and assessment requirements. Useful support has to make sense in that world too.
Then the parent side of the table
Parenting changed the questions I asked.
My son is profoundly gifted and neurodivergent. His story belongs to him, especially now that he is an adult, so I am careful about which parts I tell. What I can say is that being his mom taught me what it feels like to arrive at a meeting with reports, observations and a child you know deeply, and still struggle to get all of those pieces understood together. That lived experience does not make his story a template for anyone else. It taught me to listen harder to parents, to take the child’s own experience seriously and to notice when one environment is seeing something another is missing.
A report is useful only when it helps us understand the person it describes.
What I do now
My work starts by understanding the learner before recommending support. I bring together the evidence that already exists and look at what it means educationally: reports, school history, teacher feedback, parent observations, the learner’s own experience, strengths and the places where ability and performance do not seem to match.
From there, the work may include Report-to-Reality™, gifted and twice-exceptional support, school fit and learning pathways, parent-school communication or a bespoke academic support guide.
What I pay attention to
I want to know what the professional evidence says, what the parent has noticed over years, what the teacher sees in the classroom, what the learner says about their own experience and where the child’s strengths are being overlooked or carrying too much of the load.
I am an educator, not a diagnostician. I do not replace educational psychologists, doctors, occupational therapists, speech therapists or other registered professionals. My role is to help translate what is known into something useful for learning and school life.
How the different parts fit together
The Neuroparenting Hub is my professional home. The Neuroparenting Newsroom is where my longer-form writing lives. Books and downloadable resources is where the things I make for children and learners live, including the Hadeda Has Opinions picture-book series for younger children and The Other Way In matric literature guides.
Selected writing and education work
My work with children, families and schools is also part of a much longer body of education writing. I write particularly about giftedness, twice-exceptionality, neurodivergence, school fit and the gap between what a learner can do and what they can consistently show.
I’m the education editor for Estates in Africa. My work has also been published by education and neurodiversity platforms beyond my own sites, including Learnfully and the Davis Dyslexia Association.
Read the latest Education issue →
Read the Neuroparenting Newsroom →
I will not always have an immediate answer
In fact, I am suspicious of anybody who can look at a complicated child and promise one too quickly.
What I can promise is that I will look carefully at the information in front of us and ask whether the explanation we are using actually accounts for the child we are trying to support.