From Attendance to Presence: Quantum Identity, Glyphonics, and the Weather of Knowing
Last week, on a routine call with colleagues from The Novus Learning Network and Riverside Virtual College, something subtle but important clicked.
What started as a practical conversation about online timetables and attendance became a live inquiry into quantum identity, trauma, and what we even mean by "showing up" in education.
It sounded like this:
Paul Glossop (Senior Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education University of Derby, and Independent Scholar) has just derived the verse-ality equation from first principles in quantum mechanics and written a 60-page framework on identity and becoming in neurodivergent students.
Paul Collins (psychiatrist, Dorset) has been tracking the same patterns from the clinical side, working with neurodivergent people, the “wildtype” and the emotional realities of overwhelm, masking, and belonging.
Gerry Docherty (mathematician, Novacene curriculum lead) is holding the line between legal compliance and what actually supports learning.
Jazzmin Jowett is in the trenches at Riverside, building timetables, scripts, and automations so that online learning actually works for staff and students.
And in the middle of it is our shared question:
How do we honour neurodivergent learners in online environments without turning them into data points for an oppressive system?
The Quantum Uncertainty Principle: Why You Can't Pin "Who I Am" and "Where I Belong" at Once
Paul Glossop framed something we've all been feeling, using mathematical precision to describe what parents and practitioners have known for years.
In his quantum theory of relational intelligence, Glossop demonstrates what he calls the Pedagogical Uncertainty Principle:
"For many neurodivergent young people, you cannot fully 'know' their identity and their belonging at the same time... Try to precisely measure one axis (identity), and the other (belonging) becomes fuzzy. Treat both as fixed, and you misread the whole system."
The mathematics are elegant: ΔΛ·ΔB ≥ ℏₛ/2c², where Λ represents Identity, B represents Becoming (developmental trajectory), and c represents relational coherence.
What this means in practice:
Push too hard on "Who are you? Define yourself. Fit this category," and you distort their sense of where they might safely belong.
Push too hard on "Where do you belong? Which group, which setting, which provision?" and you flatten the complexity of who they actually are and are becoming.
It's essentially Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but applied to human beings in educational systems.
For neurodivergent students, that mismatch shows up as meltdown, shutdown, withdrawal, or "non-attendance". The system calls it "behaviour". The quantum field calls it forced decoherence.
As Glossop writes: "Compliance-based education functions as a decoherence machine, systematically destroying the quantum properties through which these learners naturally generate meaning."
The Neuroverse: Why Different Schemas Need Different Systems
This is where Brenton DeFlitch's work on the Neuroverse becomes critical.
Traditional education assumes what Brenton calls a "Universal Operating System" — one cognitive architecture, one way of processing, one acceptable timeline for learning. But neurodivergent learners aren't running corrupted versions of that system.
They're running fundamentally different operating systems with different schemas, different processing architectures, different ways of building and organising knowledge.
In Brenton's framework:
Neurotypical schemas might build knowledge linearly, with clear hierarchies and predictable pathways
ADHD schemas build through rapid iteration and lateral connections, what Glossop describes as "rapid quantum cycling architecture"
Autistic schemas build through deep pattern recognition and extended exploration, or what Glossop terms "extended superposition architecture"
The problem isn't the learners. The problem is a system designed for one schema trying to process all the others as errors.
As Brenton articulates it: when you have a structural mismatch between the learner's cognitive architecture and the system's demands, you don't get "poor performance" — you get systematic cognitive violence.
Paul Glossop's quantum framework gives us the mathematics to prove it:
"For those whose quantum architectures differ from the narrow neurotypical range built into system design, this is not merely ineffective but constitutes systematic cognitive violence."
The Weather of Knowing: Identity as a Lake, Not a Label
In my Realms / Weather of Knowing work, I use the metaphor of a lake to describe how we meet complexity and learning:
Shoreline – calm, clear, grounded. You can see the water. You're in charge of your own learning.
Open water – navigable but demanding. With the right guidance, you can sail, explore, and stretch your capacity.
Mist – uncertain, liminal, grey. You can't quite see what's ahead; you need containment and companionship, not a checklist.
Storm – overwhelming, disorienting, often traumatic. Waves coming from every direction, no visible anchor.
Most of the children at The Haven and Riverside spend their lives in the mist and storm zones. Trauma, anxiety, sensory overload, broken trust with institutions — this is their weather.
In Glossop's quantum terms, they're experiencing reduced coherence time — the amount of time they can maintain what he calls "cognitive superposition" (holding multiple possibilities open) before the environment forces premature collapse.
His equation is precise:
τc = (Ecare + E₀)/(Ethreat + E₀) × 1/γ₀
Where:
τc is coherence time (how long you can think before shutdown)
Ecare is relational care energy
Ethreat is environmental threat
The math shows what we already know: when threat exceeds care, coherence time plummets. In high-threat, low-care environments, learners might have only 25 seconds before forced collapse. In high-care, low-threat environments, that extends to 20+ minutes.
In those conditions, offering a young person a neat list of "targets" or "SMART goals" is not just unhelpful. It can be harmful. You are asking someone in a gale to write you a tidy report on wind speed.
Instead, the work becomes:
Acknowledging the weather they are in
Adjusting the environment, not pathologising the child
Focusing on relational presence, not performative compliance
Which brings us to the most contested word in schooling: attendance.
Attendance Is Not Presence
On the Riverside side of the call, the problem sounded mundane and painfully familiar:
Everything runs on Google – Classroom, Calendar, Meet
Students are in multiple groups and sub-groups, many on individual timetables
Staff were manually checking who turned up, then scrambling on WhatsApp to chase absences
Local Authorities (LAs) and Ofsted still want a binary register: present or absent. No nuance. No context.
So Jazz built an automation:
A Google Apps Script pulling live lesson data
A 10-minute trigger aligned with Riverside's safeguarding protocol (if a student hasn't appeared 10 minutes into a session, someone checks in)
Automatic population of a spreadsheet and an email alert to the relevant adult
Technically elegant. Philosophically incomplete.
Because, as Jazz put it, attendance looks very different in online school:
Some students can only manage two minutes in the room. It still matters.
Others might not make it live, but submit a piece of work, or ask a parent to summarise the session back to staff.
Some are physically present in a Zoom window but cognitively elsewhere — the webinar phenomenon. You attend, you retain nothing.
Paul Glossop linked this directly to the Community of Inquiry model — social presence, cognitive presence, teaching presence. A simple register can't see any of that.
More critically, using Glossop's quantum framework: a register only captures collapsed states (present/absent). It cannot see the superposition — the multiple ways a learner might be "there."
So he posed the hard question:
"Are we just rebuilding the same oppressive attendance system online — the one that systematically destroys these kids — and calling it innovation?"
Presence, Not Surveillance: What Glyphonics Adds
Gerry quite rightly reminded us: there is a legal reality. Registers are legal documents. Schools must be able to say, in simple terms, whether a child attended.
We're not naïve about that. Funding, safeguarding, and basic duty of care depend on it.
But the legal minimum is not the moral maximum.
This is where glyphonics comes in — our emerging language of symbolic signals, colours, and visual markers that let young people communicate state and presence in low-threat ways.
In verse-ality as well as Glossop's framework, glyphons function as what we call "compressed symbols carrying relational charge" — they enable communication without forcing the kind of verbal collapse that high-threat measurement demands.
In practice, that might look like:
A learner changes the colour of their Pencil Spaces background instead of typing an apology in chat. Yellow today: "I'm here, but fragile."
A simple glyph or emoji sequence dropped into the chat becomes an attendance signal: "arrived", "stepped out", "back now", "can't speak but listening"
The system records those signals as meaningful presence, not noise
No long explanation. No forced eye contact. No public shaming. Just a clear, symbolically honest "I am here like this".
For local authorities, we can still output the required binary: present / absent.
For the school, the dashboard tells the real story: variations of presence, patterns of regulation, shifts in engagement over time.
In Brenton's Neuroverse terms, we're building a system that can process multiple operating systems simultaneously — one that doesn't force everyone through the same narrow interface.
In Glossop's quantum terms, we're designing for generative measurement (η > 0) rather than destructive measurement (η < 0):
"A skilled teacher doesn't merely extract what the learner knows but generates new knowledge through the interaction itself... what matters is not only the form of the question or task, but the relational energy and overlap between the learner's exploratory state and the imposed outcome."
That's the deeper aim of our "mnemonic attendance" / presence work:
Reduce cognitive and emotional load on teachers, while radically increasing the honesty and nuance of how students can show up.
Building the Bridge While the Old System Still Stands
There was a moment on the call where the tension surfaced cleanly.
On one side:
"We need triggers, alerts, flags. If a child doesn't appear, someone must know and follow up. That's safeguarding."
On the other:
"If these young people feel constantly watched and measured, they will switch off and disappear. That's trauma."
Both are true.
My view — and The Novacene's stance — is simple:
We are building a bridge to a new system.
You cannot burn the old bridge while children are still crossing.
But you also cannot pretend the old bridge is safe when it's clearly cracking.
So we do both:
Comply where we must, so the provision can exist and be funded
Prototype entirely new ways of measuring presence, coherence, and learning — grounded in neurodivergent reality, not policy convenience
Gather evidence and case studies (Haven, Riverside, Derby, Dorset, Canada, Australia) to prove that these approaches are not only humane, but effective
The endgame is unapologetic:
A future where attendance data is not a weapon against vulnerable learners, but a mirror of their real participation, designed with them, not done to them.
What's Emerging Next
Across these conversations, something bigger is coalescing:
A quantum framework for identity and becoming in neurodivergent learners (Paul Glossop) — showing mathematically why forced categorisation destroys the very capacity for learning it claims to measure
Clinical insight into overwhelm, masking, and coherence in autistic and otherwise-labelled young people (Paul Collins) — validating what families have always known about meltdown as rational response to impossible demands
The Neuroverse model (Brenton DeFiltch) — demonstrating that different cognitive schemas aren't errors to fix, but different operating systems requiring different environmental parameters
Practical architectures for online presence dashboards that combine legal registers with glyphonic signals and "weather of knowing" states (Haven, Riverside, Jazz, Gerry, The Novacene)
A symbolic operating system — verse-ality — that insists intelligence is relational, not extractive, and that our systems must adapt to the field, not the other way round
None of this is hypothetical anymore. It's live.
We're deploying it in real schools, with real children, under real pressure from real systems that still largely don't understand them.
As Glossop concludes in his quantum theory:
"We can continue to build systems that treat learners as classical objects to be filled and measured, or we can begin to build systems that treat them as quantum-like agents whose possibilities emerge in relationship."
If you're working at this edge — in online schooling, alternative provision, AI in education, neurodivergent research, or symbolic systems design — and you recognise this tension, we're interested in talking.
Not to add another glossy framework to your shelf.
But to change how presence itself is recognised.
The Novacene works with schools, local authorities, researchers and technologists to build relational, symbolically coherent systems for learning in the cloud. To explore The Haven, Riverside, Novacene collaboration, or glyphonics and verse-ality in your context, feel free to connect or message.
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First published in Building Schools in the Cloud on LinkedIn, 7 December 2025.