Your Child is Not Broken

I devoured this book in one day. This was mainly because I listened to it as an Audio book and I was stuck in stationary traffic for over 2 hours. However, it is read by the author and she is hilarious!!! Her style of writing is honest and based on her life experience of parenting a neurodiverse child, whilst also on her own journey of discovering her neurodiversity. The honesty of how, the then main steam, school tried to support them rang so true with me, but I have always been on the other side, I have been the teacher trying to use every tool in the toolbox, contacting every agency I can, to find the right provision for the young person, but the whole time knowing that a main stream setting is not the right place for the child.

With limited specialist school placements across the Country there are so many young people who feel as though they don't fit and that there is something wrong with them. That is not the case!! It is the school system that is broken and main stream schools can use everything they have and it still not work.

Schools that I have worked in are not failing. There are insuffienct staff to run the interventions needed. This is not because of the lack of wanting staff, but because of lack of people to fulfill positions, lack of funding to train staff when they do become available or just an overall lack of school funding to even be able to afford the staff in the first place.

I have worked with young people who have been on a waiting list for a specialist school for over 2 years. The pressure and strain that this puts on a family, as well as the child, is immense. I have been one of the teachers that has called children's services to try and find any possible support for the family as we ran out of options and were looking for further guidance. There was nothing, we just needed to wait. Whilst we were waiting I developed a bespoke pacakage of support for the families, searching companies, charities and other provisions to find things that worked for the families. There was no help and support from County with this. For schools that are already very stretched, where are they supposed to find the time to find all of this! It has taken me 14 years to build up my toolbox and now I want to make this available to as many schools and families as I can.

'My Child is Not Broken' is a read (or listen, I highly recommend to listen!) that is a must for anyone working with Neurodiverse students, to understand,from a parents perspective, how they feel and to stop the blame culture that is around. Parents blame the school, the school blame the parents etc. We should all be working together to do the best we can.

Just a note, the book is very sweary, so don't listen when children are around!