To think a lot of MN are ableist?

i'm doing it as a single parent, and have been for 8+ years. the answer to 'where is the dad' is at work, keeping a roof over his own head and paying all his own bills.

Also, most families need two full time incomes to cope. Yes, there is DLA and CA but even in combination, it makes up only for a small fraction for the loss of income. Bills don't just stop because you have a disabled child - quite the opposite.

I do understand.

Your posts show otherwise.

sorry didn't answer your second one. For me because i have experience with kids with SEN i didn't mind doing support, i've always worked with 4-7yo, so i enjoyed it.. i spent some time with a child with DS who was in MS and they were a delight to teach most of the time.

I do know others found it more difficult, it isn't for everyone, they'd prefer to be general class TA rather than SEN support, i think it really depends on the school you're in and how they run their TA's.

I do understand.

The state stepping in to support parents is not in question. Parents 'parenting and providing care' is not a favour because parents have the primary responsibility for that. Having access to a welfare state is a privilege.

I can't speak for all schools, the one i worked in, and in the one my son attended, a TA was employed specifically for that child, or too 'share' with another SEN child in the class, depending on funding/need, with the understanding their focus was the Child, but that they may be asked to help the class at large.

my son had funding for 30 hours 1:1 so all day + breaks, and a 1:1 was considered the best use of that funding and they employed a TA who had specific ASD support training for him in yr 5&6 and his meltdowns pretty much stopped because she managed to spot them incoming and either redirected, or removed him to the schools calm room. The work she did to support him made his last two years in MS a whole different experience, i still keep in touch with her now he's 19!

Teacher? Not necessarily, its limited what they can do i'm aware, as i said upthread, i'm a qualified TA myself. but a SEN child with a support 1:1 via EHCP? you bet.

Right. This is the first response and I saw nothing about this in the OP. This is really bonkers.

Do you really feel its a teachers job to assess each child constantly for emotional disregulation and act accordingly?

Surely there wouldn't be enough time to get through the curriculum in this case?

One parent takes full time care of their child the other goes out to work.

This highlights you don’t understand the role or scope of parent carers. For example, some disabled DC, one parent cannot provide full-time care. When do they sleep? Another example, some need 2:1 at least some of the time. If parent carers reach burnout, it would cost the state far more. That is why legislation protects parent carers and entitles them to support from the state beyond benefits - although many only get support when they enforce their rights.

I agree there are grey areas and the social model of disability is well documented. I think we are in agreement that supporting people in the grey in cost effective and practical ways make good sense and its not helpful to create tension points where people arent getting support.

But i also think you still see a binary of disabled enough for benefits, and disabled enough for protection from discrimination, you just feel the binary placeholder is different than where it currently sits.

I have really struggled to get reasonable adjustments at work, mainly because some things have taken the best part of a year to receive. I have an assigned desk as I need a particular set up, a specialist chair, a foot rest and some softer adjustments like WFH on days I cannot walk.

I genuinely don't believe these adjustments impact on anyone else. None of us ever needs to be in the office, we all WFH for 18 months during Covid and the nature of our work is that there isn't any printing etc which someone else may have to do for me on days I physically can't commute an hour to work. Everyone is allowed to do some WFH and has flexibility to choose when.

On days I'm not in the office people can use my desk. They just can't use my chair as it has been adjusted for me. We have a standard chair for every desk, plus all the specialist chairs, so no-one needs to use a colleague's specialist chair.

I truly hope my colleagues don't resent my and my adjustments as much as some people on here suggest they do!

I don’t think anybody would grumble at a blind person being provided flexibility to do their job. Or a wheelchair user with little to no use of their legs etc.

But should we really be putting ADHD/ASD into that same category of disabled when their issues might be something such as “can’t cope with the smell of coffee in the office” or “needs 15minutes longer lunch to decompress”?

I think we will reach the stage where different categories need to be used and not everything should be classed as disabled. I have Asperger’s and a couple of chronic health problems that I am medicated for and will be for life. One may well kill me at some point. I find areas of life challenging and I am frequently unwell. But I wouldn’t class myself as disabled. Frankly I feel that would be a massive insult to people like yourself.
A non-verbal, extremely autistic child would be what I would consider disabled. My high-functioning level of Autism is nowhere near what that child has and as a result I wouldn’t consider it a disability. Sure, it has disabling elements that have affected me and my life, but is that not the same for everyone in some way?

Are we not getting to the point where everyone can then claim to be disabled? The person with the old leg injury who is on a lot of pain relief, the woman with migraines. Are these disabled people? If so, I don’t know anyone who isn’t disabled.

Disability as a term needs to be protected for the sake of those who need people to take it seriously. We are at risk of it losing its meaning because every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks they belong there.

Telling the teacher what they already know - that the child who becomes disregulated is being failed - is just rubbing salt into the gaping wound. We know. If we had more resource, fewer children, more space, other adults, a less prescriptive curriculum, supportive LA, genuinely expert and realistic experts - we would do better. We know.

Yes, I agree (though I have also taught more than one ‘zero warning’ child).

The difficulty is scarce resource. With 30-32 children per class, increasingly with at least 3 children per class with the possibility of meltdown (and at least 4 others with SEN of other types) and a single adult to deliver the full curriculum and manage the needs of all children, missing the small cues is inevitable.

The needs of NONE of the children in the class are being properly met, purely due to insufficient resource. And nobody knows that better than the teacher, who will beat themselves up every day for every failure.

i am of the thought that by the time a child has reached meltdown point in class, they have been failed multiple times already.

Unless you have a child that explodes with zero warnings, which is rarer, there will have been multiple points where it could have been seen as brewing headed off at the pass/diverted, and the child helped with distraction/regulation.

Tbf, everybody and everyone in that situation suffers and gets stick.

Peers may be scared (disregulated children can be scary to be around) but may also be conflicted because the school values emphasise kindness and inclusivity. Their education is impacted through disruption and reduced adult attention. Their parents are concerned, but are not able to do anything directly.

Teachers will be frustrated, sometimes physically hurt, and get stick from all sides - from the parents of the autistic child who (rightly) want more support; from the parents of other children who (rightly) want their children to be safe; from senior leaders who (rightly) want full coverage of the curriculum and for all children to make progress; from the SENCo who (rightly) wants every provision on the EHCP to be implemented - and, in all too many schools, stick from SLT who may blame the teacher’s behaviour management for the child’s behaviour.

Parents and child also get stick, as you describe.

Those with actual power to change the situation- local authority, government, those funding and rationing special school places - often don’t get any blame at all.

they're also often people who've never needed RA for themselves.

There are loads of accessible things that businesses could do that would mean less RA would be needed.. like flexible hours, hybrid WFH models, allowing workers to listen to music, or wear caps in the office, regular breaks honoured for staff to get up and move about, quiet break rooms..etc, ground floor offices with no stairs, accessible bathrooms, different types of headsets, or radios.

Those are easy to do, and wouldn't impact much on everyone elses ability to do their job... which would leave the arguing and extra cost for the adjustments that people with disabilities like you would need that would not be of use to able bodied/less impaired folk.

I have been completely blind since birth. My workplace has to provide me with adaptive technology and equipment, without which I would be utterly unable to do my job, my reasonable adjustments are not 'nice to haves', they are essentials. Your argument that everyone should be treated exactly the same might sound reasonable enough on the surface but it completely ignores the fact that many disabled people just cannot function without accommodations. Should my sighted colleagues be given the same speech-reading software I use, for example? It wouldn't much use to them but it would stop people like you crying 'special treatment' I suppose.
What is particularly frustrating is that the same posters complaining about reasonable adjustments for disabled employees are usually the same people moaning about work-shy disabled scroungers, disabled people just can't seem to win either way.

I would argue that the Equality Act is doing exactly what you suggest and seeking to protect those that find things really hard. Disability covers a wide range of disparate conditions that have very little in common other than they substantially impair your life and they should be long term. Within this definition you then have a bunch of quite arbitrary thresholds for conditions as an attempt to give some false certainty and pretend that we aren't actually just attempting to protect people who find things really hard due to their conditions when this is exactly what we are trying to do.

The false certainty leads people then to believe disability is binary. You either are or aren't disabled. A disabled person must be in greater need of protection than a non disabled person. To dispute this is ableist.

We know this isn't right. We know that the world is grey and how disabled someone is in a situation is often as much to do with the environment they find themselves than severity of the condition they are suffering from.

So in short, I agree we need to define those most in need of help and this will through necessity be exclusionary. We need to be sensible though and limit how many people are included in this category. We then need to accept that there are a hell of a lot of people in the grey. Those that aren't way over thresholds or those that just sit under them. Through necessity we need to support these people in cost effective and practical ways.

There was a lot of this from the SENCO at our adopted DD1’s (16) former high school. She regularly told us about the fact that she had the same hearing loss, i.e. they both wore hearing aids.

It sounded very much like ‘I managed, therefore so should she.’ Thus ignoring the fact that hearing loss isn’t DD1’s only disability, she has probable FASD and possibly also ADHD/autism (she’s waiting for a neurodevelopmental assessment). She’s also been diagnosed with epilepsy.

Thankfully, DD1 is now at a specialist college where she’s getting the support she needs.

Yes, as I said above, ablism is most rife when there is a scarcity of resources, which leads to conflict about how the insufficient money / materials / support / accommodation/ healthcare / social care should be allocated - and the vitriol against those who seem to get ‘more’.