Well, where do I begin? We are on par to receive funding for EOTAS. It has been agreed in principle with the head of SEND at the LA. We are definitely pushing forward as I see such a change in Charlie when he is home with me, and not under any pressure to attend education. It really does take the anxiety out of it. His previous placement was fantastic, and I have no doubt that for other children, the placement really is the best it can be for them. However, Charlie has had so much school trauma, the anxiety is so high for him it just simply isn’t an option to keep putting him through the distress of school when it’s so unproductive.

So far, we have been doing what is known as “unschooling” this is the process of removing all the learnt behaviours of being in an educational setting. i.e. break times, lunch times, moving from lesson to lesson, having set subjects. Unschooling is child led and follows children’s interests and promotes education in that way. You can learn more about unschooling and the origin of it here:

Urban Dictionary: unschooling

John Holt GWS - The Foundations of Unschooling

It is counter productive putting Charlie into a school like setting and expecting him to learn. Over the past 5 years we have got nowhere with this method so it is definitely worth a change up!. So doing a mix of child led learning and therapies from speech and language and occupational therapy is definitely going to be our next step. I will be sharing our journey with you as it happens.

Short Breaks.

Unfortunately, Charlie not being in his placement means that we have lost his Personal Assistant which was funded by short breaks. This is frustrating, because although we have been allocated hours and time, we are unable to access them. And this can be a worry, as I do not want to lose out on the support that he has been awarded. Where we go from here I do not know.

Anxiety

I have been asking for a referral to help Charlie with his anxiety for several months, perhaps as far back as April! We are no closer in this part of our journey. Community Paeds say he needs Clinical Psychology (CP) CP says that there is one attached to the school and we should be accessing that one. the school say that there is only 1 CP available and Charlie is currently on a waiting list to access. Nothing has been taken into account that should we leave the provision, where the support for Charlie will then come from. I hate to say it, but I feel as though we are being pushed into going private! Support is lacking immensely and it just isn’t fit for person. When we say it costs 4 times more to raise a child on disability, these are the costs we incur. Private therapies and interventions because we so desperately need the support to be able to parent/care for a child that is so complex.

I apologise for being so absent recently. There have been a number of curve balls that have been thrown my way. The first was a car crash! No one was hurt, but my car was completely written off and now I am without one. My course, I have just finished the level 2 Special Educational Needs and Disability course with the Skills Network. It was a fantastic course, with lots of research and resources that I enjoyed accessing however, it was such a quick turnaround on the modules and assessments (8 weeks to do 5 modules) which meant I did struggle with the time constraint.

My own mental health, I will cover more of that in the next post. But I have struggled with a few bits myself and I do feel now I am coming through it on the other end. December 26th is always a great day in my house because I have successfully completed another year of parenting single handedly and the children have had birthdays and Christmas and we are out the other side.

Universal Credit.

And finally, another life change that has been weighing on my mind and stopping me from being at peace in my mind is the dreaded change to Universal credit. I am heavily reliant on benefits due to the family circumstances that we have. I have had a number of changes to my household circumstances in September, and as a result decided to change over. I was not expected to change over, but because of the different changes involved, I thought it was best to change over. I will definitely try and keep everyone up to date on that progress, as there are many families in my financial situation that will benefit from this.

Looking forward to being back online more!

Georgina x