‘He is thriving now; a different child’: the battle to

Parents of children with additional needs in England and Wales endure endless bureaucracy, but help is out there – and it is worth the fight

When Blaine was six he was diagnosed with dyspraxia. Then, as he neared the end of his time at his West Midlands primary school, the class teacher suggested that there might be a lot more going on. “Anything that disrupted his routine was an absolute nightmare,” says Joanne Terry of her son, who is now 14. “He was behind his peers by at least two or three years. His teacher could see when he was losing his concentration. So we decided to get an assessment for autism.”

That was the beginning of a kind of Kafkaesque saga that will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of families in England whose lives involve both neurodivergence and the world of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, or Send.