just a little sister

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The best thing I saw in 2024

Last year has been a huge step up for us. Trudy has started P4, which is the second half of primary school in Scotland. It represents a difference in expectation, a move away from play-based learning and more demands on pupils. For Trudy, who has Down’s Syndrome, it was going to be harder to share…
An appreciation of strengths

I have been thinking a lot recently about the social model of disability (that’s two posts about it now), as I delivered a workshop about this. The easiest way to understand it is seeing that it sits opposite to the deficiency model, or the medical model of disability. This might list a set of ‘issues’…
What does equity mean for me?

Deciding to put our daughter into mainstream education was not as straightforward as I might have been led to believe. I had just completed a postgraduate in Inclusive Education when it was time to decide what we were doing for Trudy’s primary school. We hadn’t actually considered anything else as she showed good signs of…
Here and Now

We tend to forget that what we talk about as adults has a very different meaning for young children. We might be thinking about a holiday that we have in August because it’s June and it’s raining. It’s so easy to want to share this and get excited about it, but we forget that young…
Social model of disability

You have probably heard of the social model of disability, but I wonder how many people know the definitions of this. I certainly didn’t and I have only ever really known the social model of disability, through an instinctive ability to non-discriminate but also through years of training and education on an inclusive approach. The…
A well deserved reward

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.…