“I don’t want to say it’s his attitude but….”

Here we were. Parents’ evening, Year 11. We’ve come so far in the many years of school. We’ve gone from parenting a young child whose needs we did not understand at the time, fighting back against those nursery teachers who thought he didn’t know any words and that first educational psychologist who told us he was ‘incapable of learning.’ We’ve made it through the initial diagnoses of ADHD (where the retiring teacher told us he was the first child she’d ever had with ADHD in her 30 years of teaching) and past the autism diagnosis that turned out to be incorrect (where one of the country’s leading children’s hospitals somehow missed the fact he has 100% of the facial features identified with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome). We finally got the FASD diagnosis that then took a while to sink in and to comprehend. After that, we started the phase of arriving at teachers’ meetings loaded with binders of information having highlighted relevant bits of his cognitive profile for anyone educating him (a task made harder once he hit secondary school with the multiple teachers and more fragmented home/school communication). There were superstars in his story but for the most part most teachers didn’t get it. Then we had the very welcome switch to a specialist school three years ago, with a whole new playing field that has changed so much for the better.

And yet, even here, at the last parents’ evening of his school experience before he heads to an inclusive learning programme at a sixth form college, here we were sitting across from a young teacher who simply was not listening, who had us pegged as parents who were making excuses for a teen who “knows what he needs to do” to get changed and ready for PE. She rattled on, convinced of her belief that he “just needs to join in and he’ll be fine.” (Read more…)