Educators: why WORK WITH us?

... because I have been in your position, and I understand the challenges of working in an underfunded, overstretched system. Throughout my twenty years as a  SEN/ specialist teacher, I have picked up on these themes time after time after time. Do they resonate?

 The fear factor....it's okay to be a bit frightened by the array of diagnoses. Unlike the other 3 broad areas of needs, we know PD is 'low incidence'  (more on that later) and so you are likely to have never come across the condition before. Or maybe you have, but you're astute enough to know my mantra.... 'if you have worked with 1 child with (insert diagnosis), you have worked with ONE child with said diagnosis'.

The team around the child is huge, far too stretched on time, and despite best intentions can sometimes medicalise matters. Yes, you need to work with the health professionals to know the facts and assess risk (more on that challenge later!), but you chose to be a SENDCo, because you believe in the social model of disability. How do we put the child at the heart of the matter, when for example an unworkable  somewhat isolated therapeutic programme or medical intervention is recommended? How can we enable children to take an acceptable level of risk and scaffold towards their independence potential? As a SENDCo, you will have one eye on the present and one eye on transition. The real world is just round the corner, as all good Annual Reviews should prompt us!

We know parents have fought and fought against the unwieldy and fragmented systems of health and SEN politics. They will almost certainly be carrying emotion and rightly so.  They will sit somewhere on the spectrum of positive risk taking. How can we gage that fairly rapidly, build the trust and avoid the inevitable repeating of their story. How do we embody the  'tell us once' approach?