Understanding Potential is made up of highly qualified and experienced clinicians, but it is also made up of parents who have been where you are right now, which was the motivation for setting up the service in the first place. I am one of those mums, who also happens to be a Speech and Language Therapist, so let me introduce myself and tell you a little of my story.
I am currently a mum of two girls, one at school, and one about to go off to college. The college part sounds very scary and something at one time, in fact on many occasions, I never would have thought possible. My journey down this road I never imagined I would have to travel started on 30th December 2005. I remember the day clearly, a friend was getting married, and a wedding reception awaited me, but first just the small matter of a 20-week pregnancy scan. The scan where you see your baby looking like a little person for the first time; you ooh and aah as you listen to the heartbeat; and you get another picture to put on the fridge, right? Wrong! It turns out the scan isn’t for the parents to look adoringly at their baby, it’s actually a medical investigation to see if there is anything wrong, and there was. I will just summarise the next few years. On more than one occasion being told my daughter might not survive, too many operations to count, endless hours sitting in hospital waiting rooms, many invasive and traumatising procedures carried out, tubes for feeding, medicines to be administered, therapy programmes to carry out, and much more. I had to give up work to care for her, but she made amazing progress, started nursery school and then a mainstream school.
However, she struggled in some areas, maths was a nightmare for her; she wouldn’t understand some things the teacher said; she had huge amounts of anxiety and trauma related to her hospitalisation and it all affected her ability to learn. On top of that, she had an unrelated chronic illness that every month like clockwork, left her bed bound and unable to toilet, eat, drink or engage in anything for days on end. It affected her learning so much so, that in year 5 it was collectively agreed that school was not able to meet her needs and that she should be removed and receive Education Otherwise Than At School (EOTAS) which to you and me, means home education. So, my life changed again, having gone back to work, I left again and embarked on educating her myself so we could work around illness and appointments, and I could find ways that suited her way of learning and tackle the dreaded maths head on. By then she had received a diagnosis of dyscalculia, but I was pretty much cast adrift with just a diagnosis and web browser. We had a few appointments here and there. We had a psychological assessment at a well-known hospital that confirmed the dyscalculia diagnosis as well as identifying other areas of cognition in which she
struggled, but their recommendations were all programmes that were only accessible through the school system, and they were determined she should go back to school to have a “normal childhood”. By then we had seen the immense benefit of educating her at home and so that was never going to happen, but there was nowhere to go and no one to advise me on how to really
understand the struggles she had and how best to support her, so we did the best we could. To be fair, she has done amazingly but I still look back and wish I had known and understood more. Could we have avoided some of the tears (hers and mine!)? Could she have made more progress than she has done and achieved more? I’ll never know. However, I do know she is resilient, and feisty and determined and best of all happy. She’s about to start a college course doing what she loves, and I can yet again, go back to work and hopefully use my clinical skill to support other parents.
I hope too that my understanding of home education, the particular challenges of caring for and teaching a neurodiverse child, the EHCP process and dealing with a sometimes complicated and frustrating NHS and education system will all inform my practice and make me a better therapist.
So that’s a very short summary of the last 17 years of my life as a parent of child with additional needs. If you are reading this, I guess we might have a thing or two in common and maybe one day we might meet. If we do, I hope I can help you along your journey as you support your uniquely wonderful
child reach their potential.