This is how the programme is described:

Filmed over seven years, Born to Be Different is a frank and unsentimental portrait of the joy and heartache of life with a disabled child. Six families have allowed exceptionally intimate access to their lives following the birth of a disabled baby. The series charts everything from the initial shock of diagnosis and day-to-day practicalities, to the tough decisions and long-term reality of living with disability.

Over time, the parents’ hope and fears change as they deal with medical problems, operations and the good and bad news about their child’s condition – all this while trying to maintain a normal family life.

Some families face prejudice, while others fall apart under the strain. But there are flashes of humour and the typical pleasures of childhood too. And as the children grow up, and the differences between them and their friends become more apparent, they start to articulate their own feelings.

I watched the programme last night. It told me what the head teacher of a special school told me many years ago, and that is that there are few more caring parents than parents of children with special educational needs, as they fight to do their best for their children.

It also showed how difficult, sad, joyful life could be for everyone.

The title, of course, underlined the fact that children with special educational needs were “different”, and that it was simplistic to a degree to think that that you could treat them all the same way and as other children.

That, of course, is what Death of a Nightingale is about.

It is about something else. Life is as difficult, as challenging as it is, without also having to cope with seeing children bullied, and without having to deal with an unsympathetic bureaucracy working to a political agenda.

Last time I introduced you to “Alice in Blunderland”, a parody I wrote a number of years ago to poke fun at officialdom. Those who have had to confront that officialdom will understand it better than those who haven’t. Every line was born of some unhappy experience.

Here are just a few to illustrate that:

“The Mad Hatter was in the Chair. “Order, Order” he cried, and Disorder clumped noisily out of the room.

“The Minutes of the last meeting” he said imperiously.

The White Knight asked which Minutes he wanted. “The Minutes that go on for days and days, the Minutes that go on for hours, or the Minutes that go on only for seconds?”

In my experience the minutes of a meeting should be read, corrected and agreed at the next following meeting. Not so when I was a governor. With more than just termly meetings all the minutes of many meetings were collected together, read, corrected and agreed at the termly meeting. On one occasion this was used as a delaying tactic, and the whole process went on and on and on and on until one Governor could wait no longer, and had to leave.

I break my own rule here by harking back to my own time as a governor – history book stuff for me – but I do so to drive home the message that very often the sort of parents we saw last evening will have found that what they wanted for their children was being blocked by those who operated the system.

Act One Scene 3

Margaret Williamson, the Head teacher and Joan Errington, the English teacher lament the problem.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON …. If only our lords and masters would listen a bit more. The trouble with civil servants is they are not street wise, clever maybe, but not streetwise. They’re cocooned from reality.

JOAN ERRINGTON They’re Cuckoo, you mean.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON No, I wouldn’t say that. Many of them are trapped like we are trapped by the system.

JOAN ERRINGTON I think they are led by the wrong people, misled. There’s either far too much passion, or far too much reason, but not enough of both together. Did you ever read Khalil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’? Do you remember he wrote “Reason alone is a force confining; and passion unattended is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Yes, that’s a beautiful way of putting it. You know in Education there is actually unreason.

JOAN ERRINGTON I read an article recently by one of our clever, clever wise guys – far too many of them in education, and too clever by half for our own good, if you ask me. He said – children with special needs come in tens, scores, even hundreds, not one by one. He said you’ve got to give up the individualised approach. Would you believe it?

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Yes, I know. And I am afraid that some academics just don’t understand, and of course they go on to teach their students the error of their ways No doubt they then get their students to repeat those errors to pass their exams. Ugh.

I hope this programme helps to show people what I have tried to say in my book, and which they may not understand and appreciate.

The Author’s Note

There are very many of these disabilities. They include cerebral palsy, spina bifida with hydrocephalus, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, rheumatoid arthritis, heart conditions,Osteoagenesis imperfecta, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and neurological disorders. There are also victims of road traffic and other accidents. This is the world of burns and fractures.

There are sub-divisions of each disability.

But there are also many other quite different needs and other special schools cater for them, some with a national name and a national reputation. There are children with profound and multiple learning difficulties PMLD, emotional and behavioural difficulties EBD, with hearing problems, speech or sight impairment, sometimes total. There is also dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism. In other words, think of a fruit shop. There are apples, pears, peaches, grapes, bananas and so on. With apples alone, there are coxes, bramleys, and golden delicious et cetera. It’s the same thing with SEN.

There are about 400,000 children with learning difficulties of one sort or another. The Department of Health White Paper Valuing People envisages an annual increase of around one per cent of children with severe learning difficulties.

…

A DfES publication Removing Barriers to Achievement – The Government’s Strategy for SEN reported in the pupil level census in 2003 that there were nearly 94,000 children attending special schools.

For their part, Judges have ruled that children with special educational needs must receive education appropriate to those needs. All of this gives them legal protection and their legal rights – if they can exercise them. About 100 Special Schools have been closed since 1997. Parental choice? Legal rights? Tell that to the fairies.

As I write in the book “You cannot turn the clock back”. But even with the “credit crunch” you can do something about it.

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