With Nicola Brookes, SENCO, SEND parent It’s probably a fair bet that, if you have a child with SEND, you’ve felt, at least once, like “that parent”. The one that …
with help from Renata Watts, and all the Save Our Children’s Rights team Last week, Rachel wrote about a seemingly strategic campaign by local authorities to trash-talk EHCPs so the …
by Dr Anna Hutchinson, clinical psychologist If your child or young person has a mental health difficulty or is neurodivergent (or both), parents know only too well how hard it …
by Adam Sofianos, SEND parent campaigner We’ve written a lot about the Government’s Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value programmes, designed to “help” local authorities out of the deep financial …
with Hannah Lawrence, SEND segment manager, Twinkl If you haven’t come across Twinkl yet… where have you been? With thousands of resources for learning from Early Years upwards, Twinkl is …
Our SEND parent community is wise and knowledgeable, and we like to tap them for their views now and again. A while ago, I set the following topic: What are …
with Liz Arriens Troy, a parent of a child with Down Syndrome *Updated Government guidance on this issue was published in February 2024* The 2014 SEND reforms were supposed to …
Place2Be’s Children’s Mental Health Week 2022 is supporting the theme of ‘Growing Together’. The aim is to help and support children to understand and learn from previous experiences that they …
Back when my youngest was in mainstream, they didn’t yet have statutory support. Although the infant feeder school would have sent notes on to the junior school, as their parent, …
So often on SNJ, we talk about the difficulties faced when getting SEND help. But if you’re new to the area and you’ve only just discovered that your child might …
Ah, the school summer holidays, don’t you just love them? Six, long, glorious weeks of unstructured days stretching out before you… But just how glorious are those weeks when you …
The speech therapy process is very much a collaborative one. Even if your child is lucky enough to get regular speech therapy sessions, that’s still only half-an-hour or an hour …
It seems that at every milestone and crossroads in your child’s life, your pride, relief and excitement at their achievements is met with an equal measure of stress and worry. …
with Adam Meyersieck, Dyslexia specialist It’s always a tricky one, especially if your son or daughter has made good progress with literacy during the preceding term: how can you make …
Working Documents (WD) and draft EHC plans are quite similar, although with a draft plan you can negotiate on all of it whereas a WD only (currently) relates to sections …
One of the things that can cause big conflicts in a relationship, particularly where there is a child with special needs, is differing styles of parenting. We’ve had our own issues …
If you are concerned about any aspect of your child’s development, it can be difficult to know where to turn for advice. How can you know whether you are right …
I’ve noticed there is a lot of information on social media about Pathological Demand Avoidance, now recognised as part of the Autism Spectrum (by The National Autistic Society). It’s a …
The theme of last week’s Children’s Mental Health week was Resilience and, although I’ve written about this subject on SNJ before, I thought it was worth revisiting because, in my …
I love Christmas – I really am one of those annoying people who gets into the festive spirit with huge gusto. Sorry. However, the one thing that gets to me …
