There are many children who are not 'fine' in school, despite their parents being told they are. Welcome to Week 15 of sharing experiences from families whose children have NOT been fine in school. So many people have contacted me, keen to tell their stories, but we all know there are so many more who simply cannot write about what has happened to them. That might be because they are too broken, or still too busy fighting for the right school or because reliving the terrible, stressful nightmare of trying to force their child into school would be too traumatic.
💜✨💜 I wish 💜✨💜
I wish I hadn’t put all my trust in the professionals
I wish I hadn’t listen to that school
I wish I had validated and listened to my son sooner
I wish I had listen to my instincts
I wish I could have been kinder to me and to my child
I wish I hadn’t felt like such a failure as a parent
I wish I hadn’t let him down
I wish I’d found this group sooner
I wish someone on them awful school runs could have reached out to me and not just glared
I wish the memories of all this didn’t hurt my heart so much and that ache of isolation will never leave my story
I can’t change our experience but I strive to be what I needed in those dark times
So my wish going forward is to be that little whisper…
Listen to your instincts
Listen to your child
Trust that you know them best
You are not failing, the system is
I still don’t have all the answers… I doubt we ever will
but I do trust the right answers about my children come from with me.
We can guide, support and listen to each other but each and every one of our situations are unique.
These are all the things I wish I’d known, not just for myself as a parent, but my other children watching the struggle. The ripple effect of school attendance difficulties do not just fall to Monday to Friday term time.
It takes over every moment of every day, with emails and phone calls and researching every option, leaving no stone unturned in the hope of finding support. An understanding of your child’s needs and your situation.
The ripple effect onto the other children in the family, as they can only watch on as their siblings meltdown over going to school.
Marriage, relationships, partners begin to break as the pressure mounts because of money and careers and job losses.
Isolation feels heavy, but fear of punishment and fines and prosecution are forefront of our minds.
Schools, LA and government making it clear, parents are to blame. Punishment is what we face when support is needed.
A lack of understanding of what that ‘support’ is
And feeling no other option but to force a child into a environment you know is causing harm.
This must STOP, far too many families are facing an impossible situation.
Get your child in school or get fined.
This is the pressure government push to LA.
LA push to schools
Schools push to parents
And ultimately parents push on to a child.
A child that needs to be heard and cared for, not told their parents will go to prison for their inability to attend school.
Fines and prosecution isn’t a solution and that's why Susan and I started the petition, and why we ask for your support and voices in getting fines stopped for those whose children CAN'T not WON'T attend school.
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For the other posts in this series please click the links below (short extracts given here):
Week 1 of Not Fine In School
"My daughter said school felt like prison. She felt six hours a day of constant concentration was too much – it literally frazzled her brain. Since deregistering our daughter her daily headaches have disappeared. She sleeps better as she isn’t worrying about the next day."
Week 2 of Not Fine In School
"We have been incredibly lucky with the primary school she was at. They supported her as best they could, accommodating her needs as far as possible and being flexible with her school attendance. Even so, she found the whole experience overwhelming and ultimately it impacted on her life in significantly negative ways.
Just 48 hours into Year 7 our home education journey began, not unexpectedly!
“Keep pushing her until she has a breakdown. We need to see it happen.”
Those are the words our SEN caseworker said to me when I told her my daughter's secondary school placement was unsuitable."
Week 3 of Not Fine In School
"At the beginning of Year 6 he started to school refuse and had a high level of separation anxiety. Over the next three months we struggled. I made him go to school, sat in school with him for hours, came back at set times to show him that I would come back, but nothing helped. His behaviour was very volatile and the school were struggling to cope. When I woke him up in the morning his first words were “I'm not going”. He would refuse to get up, or get dressed, would be very tearful and plead with me not to take him. I dreaded every morning as he did."
Week 4 of Not Fine In School
"She was given detentions and was sanctioned because of her attendance. I always complained and they stopped it but in every incident, more damage was done. She went to 70% attendance. I reapplied to CAMHS for crisis intervention as she was depressed and talking about not wanting to exist anymore. In December 2020 we were given medical intervention and I pulled her out of school. She is now in Year 9 and school have arranged for her to be on a part-time timetable."
Week 5 of Not Fine In School - Eliza Fricker, Missing The Mark
"As families we have explored everything to help our children to manage to go to school and yet the pressure and the anxiety of the school day are overwhelming for them.
This leads to enormous guilt on our part as we have failed to achieve one of the most basic parenting exercises- to get our children to school (we are also appalling at any textbook bedtimes too, in case you need to know).
So we live for many years as parents, as mothers, as women, feeling the guilt and judgement that we have failed.
We lose friendships and family who struggle to understand, our relationships become consumed by this, our careers often end, as we cannot manage it all."
Week 6 of Not Fine In School
"I was on a knife-edge the entire time he was at primary school, waiting to get that call to come and calm him down (the perils of being a freelancer, working from home) or for the teacher to beckon me over at pick-up time to talk about the latest ‘incident’.
The school told me outright that he wouldn’t get an EHCP and that I could apply on my own, but it probably wasn’t worth it. Undeterred, I sought the help of a professional who could help me navigate the difficult system."
Week 7 of Not Fine In School
"As I said before, the SENCO at his current school is doing the best she can. But my son has been struggling in mainstream school since last September, to the point that he has already been temporarily excluded twice, and has only been in for a couple of hours a day since they went back in March. He has regressed against all his EHCP outcomes, and is spending what short time he is in school separated from the other children (too many aggressive meltdowns when with the class) - just him and 1 or 2 teachers in a room, doing their best to keep him happy and calm while he plays. Any attempt to bring in some sort of learning, even well-disguised, triggers his anxiety. So he’s getting no benefit, educational or social, from being there."
Week 8 of Not Fine In School
"I had been warning both the school and the local authority since the beginning of the year, about my daughters school anxiety, the sheer amount of effort, it was taking to get her to school was exhausting for both of us; and seeing her freeze at the school gate and beg not to go in was heart-wrenching for me, but I felt blamed by the school as if it was my fault, because she has a typical female presentation of autism, and an all too familiar story, where she masked in school and let it all out at home with Violent and Challenging Behaviour (VCB) in her safe space- the classic Jekyll and Hyde presentation.
When she was first awarded her EHCP a year ago, I wanted a specialist placement for her then, but her mainstream primary was named. I was told then by the Local Authority that she would have to “fail” at mainstream before they would even consider a special school placement for her."
Week 9 of Not Fine In School
"My son is nearly 10 years old and is a shadow of the boy he used to be. It breaks my heart just thinking about it. He started in a small village school at 4 years old. His older sister also attended and loved it. We started noticing he was having difficulties with other children that same year and was falling out with them on a daily basis. I was called in a few times to speak to his teacher about incidents that had happened but it was just out down to “bad choices” and, because he is so bright, they just shrugged it off and said he would grow out of it.
He carried on like this for a couple of years until he started in year 2 and the cracks started to show even more. I would struggle to get him out the car to go into class. He would jump away from the door as I opened it and sometimes climb into the boot and hide. The head teacher would sometimes come over and talk to him to convince him to come into school. Whenever this happened, he would instantly put on his mask and go with her but plead with me with his eyes. I spoke to his teacher about it but he just shrugged and said “he’s fine in school”. "
Week 10 of Not Fine In School
"From the very first full day at school our daughter struggled. She vomited every lunchtime pretty much as soon as the bell went; we were never sure if it was the bell or the thought of the dinner hall that terrified her. Very quickly she was vomiting before school and getting extremely distressed about going, clinging to me in the playground and screaming. It was awful.
Then one day after I left her at school she escaped and tried to follow me. She got out of the school grounds and into the road. Luckily a childminder we knew was standing on the pavement chatting and she grabbed her and phoned me. I wish I had taken her home that day and never taken her back but I did what society expects us to do; I returned her to school."
Week 11 of Not Fine In School
"The problem here, is that school still followed the reward, consequence method so the inconsistencies weren’t helping him at all. He managed to scrape his way through the reception year without too many major issues, other than the odd school fight. I was the mum who’d get called over to chat to the teacher at the end of the day. I loathed this, as I could see my son squirming next to the teacher as they talked about him making ‘poor choices’. His response upon leaving school was often ‘flight’, he loved the freedom from being outside of the school gates, and I was the crazed mum weaving in and out of other parents chasing him down the road. I mostly succeeded in suppressing the inevitable eruption and he saved meltdowns for the safety of home."
Week 12 of Not Fine In School
"After a long fight to see the paediatrician, our son was diagnosed with Autism (PDA profile) at the age of six. School put in strategies based on this diagnosis but it still wasn’t enough. We applied for an EHCP and during that assessment the Educational Psychologist advised a specialist setting, so we began our search for a special education school. However, as our son is a bright boy, specialist schools told us they could not meet his needs as he was not behind academically. So we were stuck between a rock and a hard place - mainstream schools couldn’t meet his needs and special schools were saying they couldn’t meet his needs. It was such a hard time in our lives, feeling our son just didn’t belong anywhere academically. We were so shocked by the lack of educational provision available."
Week 13 of Not Fine In School
"There was two teachers one that was caring and one that was well...not or at least to me didn't seem to care. The promises made were broken, they got funding for me yet I was not seeing any of that. The SEN room days went from 4, to 3, to 2, to 1... then it was all about integration and getting me to adapt. When that didn't work, I was placed in this open corridor space... alone with a book of my choosing, with a monitor person."
Week 14 of Not Fine in School
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