Happy Days

Over the past few months it has been a joy to watch my son go happily off to school, it is a far cry from the emotional upheaval of last year when we were on a roller coaster with so many ups and downs. If I am honest it was mainly downs and reading through the letters  I wrote to the school and to the Local Authority still makes me well up with the emotion of it all. It is like another world and another place but it was traumatic and the effects on J and myself were significant.

The sheer relief in September when I knew I would not have to send J back to a school where his needs were so poorly met was massive.

Now with the space of several months I can see how angry I was with the school and with the local authority who were seemingly prepared to just leave my child to flounder.  The issues stemmed from a totally ineffectual SENCO who said all the right things but who could not put them into practice. The promise of the handwriting assessment which never took place, the promises of support with J's executive function deficits which didn't happen and the total lack of understanding they showed about leaving J in unstructured and unsupervised situations.

I suspect they saw me as "that parent" always in the school, always making a fuss and seemingly never satisfied. How could I be satisfied when they addressed J's needs so poorly?

Interestingly now that J is in a school where his needs ARE met I am no longer "that parent". I am a happy parent watching her child's self esteem improve as he celebrates small achievements. I watch his school nurture him and rewards these small achievements with certificates and praise.

It helps that J also now gets regular occupational therapy support plus speech and language support focusing upon his receptive language difficulties.

J enjoys being part of the school, his joy at being elected to the school council was fabulous to see and so good. The children in his school are those who are so easily sidelined in mainstream education, not valued and not included....no matter what the schools themselves may think.

So it's a good time for us at the moment. I am in no doubt that we will continue to have our issues from time to time but these issues are now no longer a daily occurrence.