My PhD research, undertaken between 2009 and 2012, focused on understanding why the special needs system is frequently described with the use of militaristic metaphors when the system is founded on principles of collaboration and co-operation. Previous work in this area has tended to focus on specific areas of practice, for instance, difficulties in the relationship between parents and teachers, or on high-level discussions, such as what terms to use in describing children who experience difficulty learning, or on the functionality of formal aspects of the special educational needs system. Such studies, though informative, may not relate what is learned about the specific problem area to the wider context and the influences of that context on the problem area being examined. In this case study, I outline the background to systems thinking before explaining how I used a whole system approach in order to make the connections explicit between the structures of the special needs domain and the problems experienced by parents and by practitioners in education and health settings. A whole system approach was used to provide a framework for planning the study and to enable disparate research techniques and theoretical concepts to be used together. [This content is provided in the format of an e-book.]