Back to school

Well, I say that but there’s currently no school as such for Jake.

He’s been home with us since January, and work and everything else has sort of fitted into place around him. He has needed a lot of time to reacclimatise so, before the summer, we weren’t running a full timetable and he has probably drawn about 4,000,000 books of his favourite fairy tales, but now, he is very relaxed and happy. With a bit of cajoling, we can get him out of the house every day and he will navigate a busy supermarket.

Ignore the wine in the background

Back in December, every morning involved him asking ‘is it not school?’ and if it was, depending on the morning, we would have screaming, crying, hitting, and kicking. Having then refused to eat any breakfast because he was crying or heaving so much, we might eventually cajole him into the car (with a few kicks of the car door on the way) where he’d sit in sad silence for the journey to school. As he recognised the turn up the hill to the school, he’d start shouting ‘NO SCHOOL!!’ until he was back to a crying and screaming mess by the time we pulled into the car park. Then we’d have to negotiate and make all sorts of promises to get him into the school yard. Towards the last few months before he finished, we would have to leave Jake in the playground as his teachers tried to get him into the building whilst he screamed and cried. When he got into the school day, he retreated into himself and was quiet all day. By the time he got home, having not eaten any lunch, he’d be like a rocket going off.

So, here we are, back in September and the imminent start of school (Jake should be starting in a new high school next week) has passed us by.

We eventually had a Zoom meeting with the local authority who want him back in a school setting. We have appealed that he needs an alternative provision right now, based here but getting a few tutors in for an hour or two so he will get used to someone else and not so attached to us full-time.

We are waiting to see what happens next but it’s likely that the LA will propose another school and we will appeal again, eventually getting to a tribunal where we will have to fight our case about why we don’t think that a traditional school will fit with Jake at the moment.

Like most other parents of SEN kids, we have fought and pushed for Jake since he was tiny (and I definitely use the royal ‘we’ here, because Sally should have been a barrister – or serial killer – in another life). So we shall see what happens when his new school realise that he hasn’t shown up this week.

But, in brighter news, he is happy and he’s loving being at home. He has one school friend that he clicked with, and we see him occasionally for the cinema or trampolining. We have a big family so Jake sees his cousins regularly and avoids becoming a complete hermit.

And we do Waterstones, supermarkets and regular walks. He loves searching around in the props room of our local theatre and feels very comfortable there. We’re baking together and, even though I have now been reading the same book to him EVERY NIGHT since November, he goes to sleep a happy boy.