The main reason I started writing this blog was because of my firm belief that good practice models are sometimes the only way we can make real improvements. It is really important to celebrate the successes as, only too often in the world of ASN and disability, we have stories of injustice or poor practice.

So to success, Trudy has just won football player of the week! She started Footy Stars, a junior version of football in Lanarkshire which explores skills before they get into the big leagues, like her big brother who adores football and his football team. They are a mainstream group which often had a second coach who helped Trudy access the sport.

However, the second coach couldn’t make it anymore so the main coach was left doing a great job, but Trudy was left disengaged from the session because she no longer had the extra help. I had a quick chat with the coach who was training to be  a teacher and part of me wants to believe the fact that because she was a female coach, she wanted Trudy to succeed on two accounts: she’s female playing football and she has Down’s Syndrome. We talked about a few tweaks that she could implement whilst she doesn’t have the second coach. These were standing close to Trudy when she’s giving her instructions so she could model the activity within her visual field, summarising instructions using 3 or 5 words so that Trudy understands better and, most importantly, removing all distraction such as cones, bottles, anything that Trudy would use to play with instead of play football. She needed prompting to engage but, with all these strategies in place, we went from a disengaged Trudy playing with the cones to tackling, demonstrating and playing football. She very deservedly won player of the week and we were all over the moon.

There are so many complex issues around including our children and sometimes these can be related to things out of our control such as budgets, policy decisions and people but sometimes we meet someone who has the desire to include, you have the skills to include them as a parent or professional and there is flexibility in the system to implement them. All of this does not take time and resources, it’s a perfect triad of knowledge, positive attitude and appropriate context. So, here is a wonderful example of when it can go well and we have genuine impact. Trudy is delighted with her trophy and looked at it all the way home. A prize appropriately offered to reward hard work, perseverance and effort on all parts.