SEND HUGS

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Special Educational Needs and Disabilities - Help, Understanding, Guidance and Support
A coaching service and parenting community aimed at providing help, understanding, guidance and support to parents of neurodivergent children.

15/06/2026

Slow hand clap to the government for its absolutely mindless kneejerk announcement today that it's going to ban social media for the under 16s - an unworkable ban which will just drive teenagers into less regulated parts of the internet and remove any incentive for social media companies to clean up their act.

But did you notice the real sting in the tail buried in the announcement?

It's the bit where the prime minister said, "And because of the powers we took in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act, we can now move at pace... We have those powers."

No silly little inconvenient debates in Parliament. No scrutiny by MPs. Nope, "because of the powers we took", they can just publish regulations and they'll become law without any debate or further discussion.

"Because of the powers we took", they could hold a consultation in which the questions were so loaded that it was hard to see how to answer them sensibly.

They received 116,211 responses - and on the basis of those responses, they claim that over 90% of parents agree with a total ban.

90% of respondents in a small and self-selected sample is not 90% of parents. There are about 12.7 million children under 16 in the UK at the moment - and parents don't have an average of 109 children each.

Watch out for those regulations coming out later this year - but you won't be able to do a thing about them, and nor will your MP.

"Because of the powers we took."

Don't say you weren't warned about the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act.

Oh, and before you start telling me all about how necessary this social media ban is - please don't, or not in this post anyway. I'm going to do a separate post about it, and you can argue with me once you've seen my actual arguments.

This post is not about that - it's about a power grab by an increasingly totalitarian government which is taking away parents' rights to make decisions about their own children's welfare hand over fist, and callously using a few carefully handpicked and undoubtedly tragic cases of neglect and abuse to justify it and try to silence any opposition.

14/06/2026

Today’s post is only tangentially connected to SEND.

I spend a lot of my time telling my children (and husband) not to leave chargers plugged in and lying on soft surfaces such as beds or carpets.

Executive function being what it is, they always grab their devices after charging and just let the charger fall wherever it lands, without switching it off or unplugging it.

Yesterday, as I went to bed beside my son in an already darkened room, I picked up the charger from a spot on the carpet just beside my bed where one of my children had let it fall earlier in the day, so I could plug my phone in.

I felt a stinging feeling in my hand, and there was a strong smell of burning plastic.

Turning the light on, I discovered that the end of the charger had melted. There was a small mark on the carpet, and I’m fairly certain that if it had been left overnight, there would have been a fire. Because of the positioning, my bed could have been on fire by the time I became aware of it.

So this is just a PSA to make sure you teach your children (and spouses) to take care with chargers, because this is a real thing that can happen to real people.

10/06/2026

For anyone who thinks masking is just a girl thing, or who doesn't understand why masking is so exhausting, here's a conversation I had with my son on the way home from school today.

"Mummy, I hope my friend didn't see me just then."

"Really? Why's that?"

"Well, I'm kind of a different person at school. I'm, like, smiling and making jokes and messing around with them.

But I need to plug in an extra wire in my brain to do it. And if there's someone I don't know very well, I have to plug in three or four extra wires.

All those extra wires use up a lot more power, and that's why my social battery is low.

Sometimes I use up all my power in two or three minutes and that's when I have to be quiet and get someone else to do the talking for me."

09/06/2026

I'm so angry right now!

What makes local authorities think they're above the law?

Just because you CAN ignore the law and force a family to choose between spending a fortune and waiting a further year or so for their child's needs to be properly addressed after a successful appeal to the SEND Tribunal or giving up altogether doesn't mean there's any moral justification for sticking two fingers up at the law, the parents, and the vulnerable child.

People who do things like this should actually be personally held to account, because where there's no accountability, there's no justice.

My current caseload is full of children whose lives are on hold because people who have the power to withhold from them what they need, deserve and have the legal right to receive are deliberately and systematically breaking the law.

You want to know why people are terrified of the White Paper reforms?

This is why!

The only way these children are eventually going to get what they need is if their parents appeal to the SEND Tribunal.

And the government is planning to water down parents' rights of appeal and remove any semblance of accountability or enforceability from EHCPs.

I'm fed up with being nice, and tolerant, and understanding.

I want people who deliberately deprive children of the education they deserve to lose their jobs.

I want them to be forced to understand the despair that they're making parents feel by their unlawful actions.

I want them to be held to account for what they're doing to these children's futures.

And I want to win the lottery so I can help these families without having to charge them money so that my own children can eat.

Someone please buy me a lottery ticket?

05/06/2026

This week, my son has been on his Year 6 residential. He’s had an amazing time and has absolutely smashed it, participating fully in every activity - though he was a bit disappointed that the arrows they shot each other with had foam tips and the rockets they made were powered by air and water and not by rocket fuel!

He was very nervous beforehand - he’s terrified of heights and has never even wanted to climb on playground equipment much. He was particularly worried about the water activities and the climbing.

The reason he was able to go is that his teachers agreed he didn’t have to stay overnight, and we could choose from day to day which activities he would join in with. So I’m staying in a hotel nearby and picking him up each evening.

At the end of the first full day of activities, he was enthusiastic but exhausted. He initially didn’t want to go back the next morning and had a lot of trouble getting up and leaving our room, so we made a little tweak and decided he wouldn’t do the remaining evening sessions.

That was the right decision, and he’s slept like a log each night and gone off happily in the morning.

On Tuesday evening, he was excitedly telling me how much he’d loved the day, and I said, “Should I have let you do the whole thing and stay overnight?”

He replied, “No, it’s because I know I can see you and have all the things I need at night that I can have fun in the day.”

Some schools say the residential is all or nothing and all children have to stay for the whole time if they go at all. I can see why - it is extra work for them to meet me twice a day for the handover, and it could potentially have been unsettling for the other children (though they didn’t see me when I went to pick him up and drop him off). But they’re also not dealing with an overtired, overwhelmed child.

This is one reasonable adjustment which has worked brilliantly for us.

(The photo was taken on our way back to the hotel on Tuesday.)

03/06/2026

I wrote yesterday about a letter from the school of one of my children that had made me cry.

I received another letter later on in the day that made me cry for a different reason.

This one came from the new school that my son will be attending from September. He's currently in Year 6 at a small, nurturing mainstream school (which, incidentally, handled his transition into Year 6 particularly brilliantly), and I had been very worried about his transition to secondary school - it was not an easy transition for my other child.

But this transition will be very different. From September, my son will be at a special school which is set up to support children with his needs.

The school has sent me a detailed letter setting out the full transition plan. It includes information packs for parents, visits by the transition team to children's current schools to find out all about their academic progress, pastoral needs and friendship groups, transition days at the school for the children, an information session for parents, a welcome barbecue before the end of this term, and 1:1 meetings for families to meet staff, discuss their child in more detail and ask any questions they may have.

This is a school that's curious about my child and what he actually needs, and wants to ensure that he is happy and comfortable at his new school, and that's what made me cry - happy tears this time.

I know that what's possible for the small intake that they have at a special school can't be replicated in full for 200-odd students moving to a mainstream secondary school, and I know many mainstream schools do their best.

But if they want more children with SEND to attend mainstream settings, wouldn't it be marvellous if they could at least do this for the children identified by their primary school or parents as needing additional support? Or even just show some curiosity about what might help them to settle into their new school?

The work put in would pay dividends in enabling children to access their new school in September, and be so much more effective than adopting a "fail first" attitude and then addressing poor attendance with punitive measures when it inevitably ensues.

02/06/2026

I mentioned before half term that I had cried when reading a letter from my child's school about their new attendance strategy.

Yesterday, I received confirmation that this was not just because "Mum's very anxious".

I was right to be worried - the school has emailed me to demand that my child's attendance improve in the next ten days.

This is the child whose attendance was 43% last year and is 58% for the year to date.

Instead of celebrating that success, they've started treated late arrivals as unauthorised absences. And now they've sent me this letter. I hope it's been sent by some automated system and that when I get through to a human, they'll continue to support us.

But can we talk about their timing?

They sent the letter the day school started back after half term. That's a day which is very difficult not just for my child, but for huge numbers of children who experience emotionally based school non-attendance (EBSNA). My child did make it into school, but arrived later than usual. The late arrival was coded as unauthorised absence.

I had emailed the school in the morning to explain that I was unavoidably going to be away from home all week and that my husband would do his best to support our child's attendance, but we could not predict what effect my absence might have. My husband has taken the week off work to support our child.

Having sent that email in the morning, it felt like a low blow to receive an attendance letter only a few hours later.

If you're experiencing similar, please don't forget that the statutory attendance guidance permits schools to code absence due to EBSNA using code I for illness, and that parents are not required to provide medical evidence unless there is genuine concern about the validity of the illness.

In addition, the guidance does not require schools to code late arrival after the register has closed as unauthorised absence. The exact wording of paragraph 291 is, "If a pupil is recorded with code N but arrives later in the session after the register has closed, the attendance register must be amended to record them as absent using code U or another absence code that is more appropriate."

EDITED TO ADD: I emailed the school about this and got an almost immediate and very satisfactory response. This is why I would always encourage parents to inform themselves about what the law and guidance actually say and to engage fully with the school from the beginning.

Automated emails can be very distressing to receive, but many (though, in my experience, by no means all) schools will engage in constructive dialogue if approached directly.

30/05/2026

Other people: So if you cast your mind back, when would you say your child started to show signs of PDA?

Me: Pretty much from birth, but Facebook gave me a pretty good example this morning from a month after her second birthday.

Facebook memory from May 2014:

Whenever we’re out in the car, N argues with the sat nav. Example from today:
Tom Tom: "After 100 yards, turn left."
N: "Nooooo! Not turn left. Turn right!"
TT: "Cross the roundabout, third exit."
N: "No roundabout. Not go on roundabout, not take motorway!"
TT: "After 100 yards, turn right."
N: "Not turn left or right. Go straight on!"
Me: "This is a T junction. If we go straight on, we'll end up in the sitting room of that house."
N (wails): "Noooooo turn left, Mummy! Noooooooo!"
And yet when we were on our way home, she asked me why I hadn't turned Tom Tom on...

27/05/2026

This book arrived today, and begged me to stop working and have a quick look at it.

I shouldn’t have listened, because the quick look became a longer look, and then I was sucked in completely and trapped inside its pages when I really should have been working.

If you have a child with SEND, this book will make you nod along in recognition. It’ll make you want to cry, scream and throw things. But it’ll also let you know that you’re not alone.

It’s a novel, and the author is careful to say that none of the characters or events are based on any particular person or event. Nevertheless, you’ll recognise many of them. And most of all, perhaps, you’ll recognise yourself.

It’s beautifully crafted - the writing is understated but searing in its accuracy and honesty, and your mind will fill in all the details behind the sometimes starkly presented prose. It also has some one-liners that you’ll pause over, read again and again, and remember.

This feels like an important book - one I wish I could give to all sorts of people, sit them down and make them read it.

But as one of the children in the story says, “If the lesson was learned, why are we still doing homework?”

Address

Chesham

Telephone

07930842137

Website

http://www.sendhugs.co.uk/

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