Send crisis wrecking womens careers

[Enoughofthisnow]

Not sure where to post this really. I'm just feeling really done in. This article has just summarised my life and my mother's before me and I'm fed up with it. I've just spent my entire adult life as a carer for a sibling who died a couple of years ago, constant battle to get the care they needed - worked part-time a lot to cope but not enough hours to warrant carer's allowance, so dip in earnings, laughable pension and several failed careers behind me. I now have 2 dc with suspected SEND in need of assessments, elderly parents with failing health and work full-time as a single parent. There just isn't enough of me to go around and I still can't put myself first. I am done in and fed up. It's the 21st century ffs! We should have this shite sorted out by now.

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/quit-fight-son-send-crisis-wrecking-womens-careers-3398843

Yes to all of the above.

Sending strength 🧡🧡🧡 I wish I had a quick fix. It's so shit!!! All this lack of help for kids always impacts mothers worse and none gives a shit!! 🧡🧡🧡

I'm half expecting to be shafted by universal credit next year as I won't work full time, despite having a 16yr old. The school need me to drop her back and forth ad hoc (this is good for her and works) but no full time employer would allow it.

I'm in this situation too, hanging on to my job (as a teacher) by the skin of my teeth. My employer has been as flexible as possible, which is not easy in my field. Trying to advocate for a child with SEND in mainstream education because there are no suitable specialist school places, and having to be the driver that ensures school and local authority fulfil statutory duties and deliver some kind of suitable provision for my child is like another job. Managing appointments and assessments, and routinely completing more paperwork than I've done for anything, ever, bar a postgraduate professional qualification, takes up an inordinate amount of time, at crunch-points such as leading up to key transitions, hours every week. This isn't me being 'precious' about my child's provision, it's just that if I didn't put this work in, the flimsy structures put in place to support DD would grind to a halt, she wouldn't cope in school and I would need to leave work to non-electively home educate.

Working in education I see families all the time who just don't have the resources ‐knowledge, time, finances‐ to engage 'the system' and embark on the long hard slog of getting their child's needs recognised and supported in education. Because left to their own devices, schools won't necessarily do it ‐there's no money in the system. And it's invariably women, mothers, who bear the brunt of this institutionalised, systemic oversight.

I'm on various online forums and groups pertaining to my child's specific needs, and the other members are almost exclusively women, pretty much all of whom are in this same precarious position of seriously having to consider surrendering careers and financial independence because there just isn't enough support in the system to care for vulnerable children.

It is really rubbish. I don't have the struggles that lots of pp do as my child has a stable condition and school works for him. His needs are also quite visible and easy to accommodate. But when he was younger he had quite a lot of hospital appointments and even though I was only working two days a week I regularly had to take unpaid days off while still paying for the nursery day. It generally took all day even for a ten minute check up because my work and the hospitals weren't anywhere near each other (plus all the faffing with parking, clinics running 2 hours late etc). It's ok now because I have a different job and the appointments are much fewer now he's older so for us it was only an inconvenience but it was clear to me how easily it could make working impossible just because of attending appointments (either directly by losing the job or financially impossible due to still paying for childcare but not getting paid). I'm not sure what the answer is though - I wouldn't expect either my employer or the nursery to take a financial hit because of my child's appointment - especially when the employer is already being flexible and organizing someone else to cover me. Nor do I expect the hospital to do an appointment at 7pm or on a Saturday. It would have helped if the different hospital departments could somehow coordinate so he saw them all on the same day rather than separate ten minute appointments with at one point six different clinics (and that's for a not very serious condition, just one that doesn't fall neatly into a single department).

Yup. I had to stop work to care for my SEN kid who the LA refused to give a school place. Managed to pay interest only on my mortgage but was close to loosing my house. I don't know how I will ever pay it off and have no pension lifetime of poverty for me. While kids dad fucked off and refusing to have him because he has to work.

It's the attitude of services too. Automatic assumptions the mother will give up work, will ferry to appointments, will collect child from provision when they struggling. They NEVER call the dad

It does destroy womens careers. I've managed to carry on working but part time and not in my former career.

I can only do this because I have a dh who has supported this by damaging his career too. Not to the same extent. But he used to have a career that involved travelling all over the world for large chunks of time. He now works standard hours from home, with a boss that let's him do middle if the day pick ups or hospital.

Between us, we have done 4 hospital trips and 2 early pick up from school. [This week alone]

I think we'd be financially better off with him doing his previous career and me not working, but I struggled mentally with doing all the caring alone, when he was abroad.

I really feel for single parents.

I can't read the article because it's paywalled but absolutely yes. I'm very lucky in one way because I have very flexible and well paid work but on occasion I worry about neglecting it and when I'm doing it I worry about neglecting DD. Then there's the house 🤦‍♀️. I'm a single parent so no chance of help from anyone and there are always so many battles to fight. There's one I need to tackle now but I don't have the energy.

Sending love to all SEN parents. No wonder that, according to one study, we display the same level of PTSD found in soldiers on the battlefield.

I'm so sad. Is there anything we can do?

My youngest has 18 months left at school but my health is wrecked and I've realised this week I will need to give up my professional role and I don't know what to do.

I have accessed all the support I can but there's no 'Boots on the ground' help and I am too tired to be doing it any more. It is so isolating.

Out of interest. Has anyone used AI to fill out forms? It seems it would be a good use of the technology.
https://www.pcguide.com/apps/can-chatgpt-fill-out-forms-yes-heres-how/

Yes, I have ptsd, mainly from trying to care for my sibling which was horrendous. But it's all being triggered again now by the circumstances I'm in now. I'd be really interested to read the study you mention, if you have a link?

I too have no idea what the answer is. Working full time even with flexibility is not it when there just isnt enough hours in the day! Totally back to feeling guilty at work (who are lovely, I'm very lucky) and guilty at home too. Can't win.

Carers allowance needs to be made more realistic and flexible to cater for the ebbs and flows of caring.

I was made redundant and on gardening leave just as my daughter started secondary and fell apart. 5 years on in the absence of meaningful help/change I am still here. I was in quite a well paid job before but feel unemployable as a middle aged, menopausal woman semi broken by all that’s happened to my child. We only got a diagnosis yesterday after 5 years at CAMHS and too late to help her with her GCSEs.(they say you get help regardless of diagnosis but it’s not true especially if a high masking girl)

People ask me what I think needs to change with regard to SEND provision, in order for children and families not to end up bearing the brunt of the lack of funding in schools and local authorities.

The thing which really cracked us was when DD couldn't cope in mainstream secondary school after transitioning from her small, supportive primary school. This was the point at which small cracks became chasms, and what had previously been a mainly cognition based SEN took on a SEMH dimension due to lack of support (despite such support being explicitly pledged through the EHCP).

This is the case for so many families: children who were coping in smaller settings crash out of secondary school, often with serious consequences for a family's ability to support itself, impacting on quality of life and well-being. This should tell us something about at least one of the changes necessary to save women's careers: creating smaller SEND resource-base provision within all mainstream settings as a matter of course, so that children who need additional support at school can continue to thrive in their communities and local catchment schools and not face a choice between hour-long commutes to specialist provision or hugely expensive private alternative learning provision or veritably face-planting in the void of under-resourced mainstream placements. DD was desperate to attend mainstream with her lovely friends from primary and with is dotted and ts crossed in her EHCP we naïvely thought all would be well. Had DD been supported in a smaller hub or unit within the mainstream setting I really think she could have thrived, and our lives would have looked so different.

@TheMotherShipAhoy Yes, it comes down to funding in the end. What a society is willing to pay for and how.

@BruFord Quite. But I find it so frustrating that a fix such as integrated resource bases which would enable many children who could cope in mainstream to do so, albeit in smaller, supported in-house hubs, need not necessarily be all that expensive. At least not as expensive as the cost of implementing private AP out of county. The way it looks now, DD will leave secondary school with attendance of approximately 25% and zero GCSEs.

My daughter ended up in a PRU as no suitable provision and she had missed too much school - she was out for 8 months in Yr10. In my borough there are no Education Welfare Officers ensuring kids get an education. After going round the houses for 8 months as not even the council seemed to know whose job it was, I discovered it was my daughter’s social workers job. He had no idea.

I may do a proper complaint (with a diagram of course) in the future but am still in the trenches trying to get her help.

3 autistic dc here. One out of school, one back in about 80%. I have managed because dc started his own business (not successful compared with what he was doing) and this allows me to work 18hrs per week. Even then, I am short changing everyone and everything. I didn’t work for 12 years when they were younger.

Dh is helpful, but he is not the same as me. He does some (but not all) appts, but I do the school meetings and calming dc down.

It has also left us quite isolated socially, which feels like it compounds the work. We are constantly juggling times, appts, who is with dc. One of my dc really turned a corner and now has university offers (over a year out of school and 80% time since them - I have to smooth this over with school always). People comment, what were you worried about, knew they’d always do well. Nope, that’s hours of caring right there, it wouldn’t have happened without considerable effort. And strangely for us, it’s only CAMHS that recognise that!

@TheMotherShipAhoy @Justnot The education system is in such a state, it’s ridiculous. Teachers leaving in droves, resources cut to the bone-it’s appalling that there are no Education Welfare Officers in your borough, @Justnot-but sadly it doesn’t surprise me.

As the OP says, no wonder careers are wrecked, you have to do everything yourself. 💐

In afraid the send system is in dire straits.

I was quoted something like 'double the amount of children but the same budget had shrunk to that of 20 years ago' a couple of months ago at one school, specifically for targeted therapy.

Certainly the budget I have access to in my role, to provide resources for lessons, is 60% less than what it was 8 years ago (send school.) But, of course, prices have gone up.

Sorry about hte delay @Enoughofthisnow we were away for the weekend (with all that that implies...) the article about traumatised parents is here: https://www.affinityhub.uk/userfiles/documents/BACP%20CYPF%20journal%20article%20traumatised%20parents.pdf there may well be other studies I'm not aware of

Yes. DD has cost them far more as they won't support her than if we'd got the support bedded in halfway through primary school when I asked for it.

I was toying with adding up the cost of box ticking parenting courses, police when she ran off, 111 when she was mentally falling apart, GP apts, two CAMHS appointments and follow up reports, endless emails between me and various school staff, the early help team and goodness knows who else I forgot.

She may scrape GCSE's but for the next few months I will be her taxi getting her back and forth for what she can cope with.