Savage Tigers, Cruel Birds

This is my first story. It is a dialogue between a mother and her daughter. The daughter has Autism, and is non verbal. Her internal dialogue is based on her very different sensory perception of the world, and she is prone to sensory overload. She self harms by clawing her own arms until she draws...

Savage Tigers, Cruel Birds

This is my first story. It is a dialogue between a mother and her daughter. The daughter has Autism, and is non verbal. Her internal dialogue is based on her very different sensory perception of the world, and she is prone to sensory overload. She self harms by clawing her own arms until she draws...

I don’t know.

This is the story of the child who is questioned by the police officer, the social worker, the court official, the teacher, the solicitor, the angry adult. Children can find it too hard to express themselves at all when under duress, adults can find it too easy to fill in the gaps with what they...

My Bucket List

It is very hard for young people who live in wheelchairs to take risks. Often there might be additional physical frailties that hinder exploration of the world. That doesn't mean they won't want to! Here are 30 things a boy in a wheelchair might like to try. My Bucket List Get attacked by wasps or...

The Bluebell

This poem is about the death of a  small girl who was a pupil in a school where I taught. Our friendship started in one Summer, and ended a year later. I was on playground duty, in the shade of a climbing frame, when a tiny girl appeared in front me holding up an imaginary...

A Ghost Behind Glass

I have taught in six special schools over my career. All of them were built right out on the edge of town, except for one, which was pulled down and rebuilt right out on the edge of town. One had tiny windows, raised high on the wall so people inside could not see out, and...

It’s Too Late

The love of a parent of a someone with additional needs survives the shock of altered expectations for their child, people making glib judgments, intrusion into their lives by 'professionals', isolation and demands that can go to the very limits of what can be borne. It survives because it is unconditional, and because from the...

Sister Crow

The readiness of children to assume that they are to blame is terribly, terribly sad. They have a natural desire to please and impress the adults around them, and often they judge themselves harshly if they feel they have failed. I have had to comfort children in awful distress because they think they  go to...

When

Increasingly we are learning that people with developmental difference are still people. They can cook, drive a car, fall in love, get married and have children. These things are, thankfully, entering the realms of ‘normal’. One of the last taboos is the way we treat such people when they die. We have yet to untangle...

New Year’s Eve

This poem is for the children who would ask that you do not sympathise with them, and make a virtue of the challenges they face in life. They might ask that you recognise instead the efforts they make to overcome those challenges, and reward them by letting them walk with you through life, join in...

If you love me

Every teacher would know the student who won't be still, who can't sit on the mat with the rest of the class, who can't seem to listen or even tolerate being in the room. Sadly, where extra resources are put in for those students, all the effort seems to go into making them do those...