It all started when…

….we realised the school our children attended was not able to meet their needs. They were fine academically but the social and emotional care was almost non-existent. Sadly, this seems to be the case for many adopted children. Either the resources are not available or the teachers are not trained sufficiently to identify the specific needs of adopted children. Even when training is in place, a child can go unnoticed amongst thirty others. Let us just be clear from the outset that we are not school or teacher bashing, we are not sharp elbowed, pushy parents of angels with rose tinted glasses on. We simply want our children to be helped with their needs. We have many points of reference in our circle of family and friends: a lead SENCO of a referral unit, 4 plus teachers, a school pastoral worker, a school business manager plus our post adoption social worker and many friends on the same journey as us.

An example of this is our AS7 Dave. Dave is hypervigilant, he is very aware of his surroundings and given his background he has survival techniques that Bear Grills would be envious of. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on the circumstances, Dave would use these survival techniques at school and blend into the background, only to come home at 3.30pm and have a two-hour meltdown because he had held it together all day. When we expressed our concerns to school, we were told they could not help because he wasn't disruptive enough. Quote: “He's not throwing chairs across the classroom.” We soon began to realise that this was going to be a difficult journey. We looked at changing schools, but did not find anything suitable that was local and because Dave has Attachment Disorder (AD) we did not want to cause him more distress. We continued to attend meetings with the head, the SENCO, Dave's therapist and our social worker, however nothing improved, we were simply made to feel like a problem.

Mark and I discussed the possibility of Home Education and in July 2019 we attended the Home Education Families Festival (HEFF) at Newark. We met so many lovely families at this festival and learned so much. When we returned home, we continued with life as normal wondering how and when we could make the leap to home education. I believe in fate and with a little help from the Corona Virus of 2020 we were able to follow the path we had been looking for.