Starting School

Aiya has been attending a main stream day nursery since she was about 2 years old for a few sessions a week. The main stream nursery were brilliant with her, I would not have left Aiya with them if I didn’t believe she was in safe hands. The nursery Aiya went to was the same nursery my son had attended for 4 years when I worked full time, he was usually dropped off just before 8am and then picked up at 6/6:30ish. They were so warm and loving to both my children and Aiya was well settled, and although they had never looked after a child with additional needs they went above and beyond to ensure they were doing their best to look after Aiya. However, she was ready to be stretched by professionals who were trained to get the most out of her developmentally, myself and the nursery had reached our limit as to how much we could progress her without specialist professional intervention. You would think it would be easy transferring Aiya into a special school nursery given her needs, however nothing is simple. In order to be given a place at a special needs school (or help for additional needs within a main stream school) a child needs an EHCP (Educational Health Care Plan) to assess what type of needs they have. For Aiya this was compiled of reports from Speech and Language, Physiotherapy, Portage, Sensory Support, her current nursery and our SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disability) coordinator. Pulling the EHCP together was approximately a 6-month process where the specialists all wrote individual detailed descriptions of Aiya’s abilities, which I approved and then they were submitted to the EHCP panel to review.

The panel then took a further 3 months to agree the recommendations presented by the specialist looking after Aiya, not because they disagreed, but because of bureaucracy. Due to local authority funding cuts, there are staff shortages to children’s service’s particularly special educational needs services. My SEND coordinator no longer exists to me, as it’s a ‘nice to have’ service and it is not deemed by the government to be a mandatory support required if you have a child with special needs. However, in the first few years of dealing with Aiya’s disability our SEND coordinator was crucial in ensuring we had all the right support in place and Aiya was being looked after by the right people. It was her who filled in all the paper work for the EHCP, she then moved on to another job and they have not replaced her.  I would not be aware of all the assistance available to Aiya if I had not had this support and I often wondered how people coped without this person looking out for them.

We are in a very fortunate position to have two outstanding special needs schools within a 20-minute drive of where we live, although they are in opposite directions of one another. One school is in the borough I live in (who I pay my council tax to) and the other is in the neighbouring borough, as I live on the boundary, I am able to access schools across two different boroughs and both are fantastic. We visited both schools, however logistically the school outside my borough made more sense as I could drop my son off at school and then drop Aiya off rather than picking one child to be dropped off by me and the second by another means.

After I gave my preference of which school I wanted Aiya to attend and the EHCP was in place, the allocation of a school place came down to money and if my borough was prepared to transfer her education funds to another borough, they finally agreed to this on the basis that I would not claim or request transport for Aiya in the future, as that would be a further cost to the council. I wasn’t aware that the council provided transport to school prior to the process, so it was not a deciding factor for me, but what if you didn’t have a choice, didn’t have the means to drop your child to school or had to work, what would they have said then?  This is all a very long boring process, but it is these types of things that keep me busy. I need to review every document and sign it off, I sign at least one authorisation letter for Aiya a week, from manual handling agreements to allergy processes.

The good news is after what was a very long process Aiya was allocated a space in the school of our choice and started September 2019 for 3 hours a day (9am – 12pm) Monday to Friday.  The school nursery environment has been absolutely brilliant for her development, she has weekly swimming, yoga, physio and OT (occupational therapy) sessions. All of which are geared to Aiya’s specific needs. Along with the specific therapies, she is given 1:1 care and all the activities are geared up for children with severe special needs. Having all these sessions on a regular weekly basis and the interaction by the trained teachers has improved Aiya’s cognitive ability, she is much more engaged with us and seeks our attention through physically trying to touch us or get a reaction from us. Her new game is to pull hair and wait for us to scream, then she chuckles to herself, I’m torn between ‘well done’ for understanding cause and effect and ‘no, stop that’, which she also laughs at, for some reason the word ‘no’ is funny to her. We are such bad disciplinarians when it comes to Aiya, but it’s really hard to tell her off especially when you can’t tell if she doesn’t understand or simply just wants to do her own thing. I suspect it’s the latter, but to see her make a cheeky grinning face when she’s done something naughty just makes my heart melt. She’s even got her older brother wrapped round her little finger, when she’s kicking him or pulling his hair he says ‘mummy she’s being so annoying, but she’s so cute so I don’t want to be mad with her’. It’s a rite of passage to be annoyed by your younger sibling, I am so pleased my son has got to experience Aiya annoying him and it’s so cute to see her annoying her big brother like a little sister should.