Read: Guardian article about how a mum of deaf girl has had to start teaching her A-Levels at home

This article in the Guardian is well worth a read. It’s about how delays in the new EHCP system for pupils with special needs has led to one mum of a deaf girl having to teach her at home herself. In the most moving passage, her daughter Thea writes about her experiences at school and finally realising “there was nothing wrong with me.”

Extract:

My eldest daughter, Thea, is exceptionally bright. She has normal ambitions of getting top grades and going to a top university, getting a degree and a job. However, she is deaf. She has also been seriously ill, and because of that she is now in an academic hinterland. She should be in year 13, getting offers for degree courses. Instead she is at the dining table trying to work to a teaching scheme we have found on an examination board website.

Like thousands of disabled children before her, she has been ground down trying to survive mainstream education. After five years at a top state grammar, living on her wits, trying to follow conversations with people whose heads were turned away, being left behind in friendships, straining to listen in class against the backdrop of a humming whiteboard that interfered with her hearing equipment, she just crashed.

Read the full article here: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/dec/15/alevels-ehcp-special-educational-needs-deaf

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