Institutional normalisation is not a legal defence, and it is not a satisfactory answer.
“This is our practice” is one of the most common responses families receive when they challenge something a school has been doing for a long time without being questioned. It is offered as though longevity confers legitimacy — as though a harmful practice, repeated across enough years and applied to enough children, eventually becomes acceptable by virtue of its persistence. It does not. Practices can be widespread, culturally embedded, and professionally normalised while remaining unlawful, discriminatory, and harmful. The history of institutional harm is largely a history of exactly this dynamic.
When a school tells you that something is simply how they do things, that response contains important information. It tells you that the practice is not an isolated incident attributable to one educator’s poor judgment on one occasion — it is structural. It is a policy, a culture, or an embedded approach that the school has chosen and continues to choose. That structural character does not make escalation less appropriate. It makes it more so, because the remedy for a structural problem is not a conversation with the individual who implemented it on a given day — it is a formal challenge to the practice itself.
BC’s Human Rights Code sits above school policy. The School Act sits above district practice. The duty to accommodate is a legal obligation that cannot be discharged by pointing to a consistent pattern of failing to meet it. A school that has been placing disabled children in hallways for years, running token economies that autistic children structurally cannot succeed in, or applying partial schedules as a default response to complex needs has not established a lawful practice through repetition — it has established a pattern of discrimination that a formal complaint process can address at the level of the practice rather than the individual incident.
“This is our policy” and “this is our practice” also warrant scrutiny as distinct claims. A written policy that can be produced and examined is at least accountable to its own terms — you can assess whether it was followed, whether it complies with provincial legislation, and whether it accommodates disabled students adequately. A practice that exists without a written policy basis is something else entirely: an institutional habit that has never been subjected to formal scrutiny, that carries no documented justification, and that the school may struggle to defend the moment it is required to do so in writing.
When you receive this response, ask for the written policy. Ask where it is documented. Ask how it accommodates students with disabilities. Ask whether it has been reviewed for compliance with the BC Human Rights Code. Those questions do not require legal training to ask, and the school’s difficulty in answering them is itself informative. A practice that cannot withstand those questions in an informal conversation will not withstand them in a formal one either.
Policies do not override rights. Normalisation is not justification. And the fact that other families have not complained does not mean the practice is acceptable — it means the practice has not yet been formally challenged.