This is what the system doesn't see

[I’m a school leader, responsible for education and opportunity for many young people. Yet my own daughters (Patti and Joni), who are autistic, are failed by the system I work in. The education system that is meant to deliver for every child. Including mine.

Ironic? Of course.

Heartbreaking? Yes. Every single day.

The UK’s Education system is widely acknowledged as broken. Shattered, even. But without serious investment and even more serious strategy things won’t improve. My daughters are 14. It won't improve in time for them to benefit them as children. They will likely have to find an alternative way as adults. We’ve known for some time that we cant rely on the system as it is. This knowledge has my husband resigning from his own job so that one of us can support them in the ways they need to be supported.

The system has become a maze and even those who built it can't find the way out. This is partly because they lack knowledge of our realities. They have nothing on which to base genuine empathy. They can’t see the horror that so many families endure.

This is what the system doesn't see…]

The system doesn't see Joni; uniform on, hair brushed, ready for school but frozen at the front door. A girl filled with dread of the anticipated mainstream noise and shrieks of others teeming into crowded classrooms. It doesn't see the hours spent in low stimulation breakout rooms catching up on the work she missed either because she couldn't concentrate amongst her classmates or because she hadn't been able to leave the house while that lesson took place.

The system doesn’t see Patti, 14, at home. Isolated. Fearful of her peers to the point that she’ll crouch to the floor if we drive past any group of teenagers. A bright, political, academic mind that dreams of travel and learning but cannot step outside the house alone. A girl limited to the same single coffee shop, on the same afternoon each week at the same table. It doesn't see how she’s trapped in the same spaces by a monstrous anxiety while her cruel imagination taunts her with the notion of travel to exciting places; places that in truth, she’d have no idea how to experience.

The system doesn’t see Joni who takes two to three hours of coaxing each morning just so we can get her in by 11am. The system doesn’t hear her call me up and beg me to let her miss just one day of the education that she so desperately desires. It doesn't comprehend the confused duality of being so desperate to avoid something and being so desperate to be part of it at the same time. The system doesn't care that she feels this and she’s only a child. It also doesn't seem to care that her time with her family becomes time spent in recovery from school. In a dark room. Alone.

The system doesn't see Patti, two years out of education, working only in ten-minute bursts, because she has forgotten how to learn and understand. It doesn’t see the fear in her eyes as we click open her folder and I hand her a pen. It doesn't feel her crippling pain; a sharp stone piercing the pit of her stomach each time she tries because she’s failed and failed and failed (her words, not ours).

The system doesn’t see the truth behind Joni’s words spoken without the socially required filter. It doesn't recognise the looks and sniggers of other children who can only assume she’s descended from another planet. The system seeks to correct her uniqueness and make her more like those whose laughter she’s (mostly) oblivious to.

The system doesn't see Patti’s evenings where fatigue overwhelms her senses filled with sobbing, fear rising to its peak where frustration, anger and rage dances with sobs and tears. She can't say why. But it's real and it's dark. And it figures for her: night after night after night until sleep finally comes.

The system doesn't see one of its own leaders trying like mad to deliver on its promise by day then returning home as a mother, to regulate, soothe, then teach a child the system rejected. It doesn't see a father quitting his job for the sake and safety of his family only to realise that it doesn't care about the sacrifice he made. It will still refuse to see his daughters.

I send love to all the families who the system doesn't see.

I guess I just wanted to say…. ‘I see you all’.