One morning back in May 2016, my wife and I had a visit from a nurse, who had come to the house to discuss our daughter, Alice. We made coffee, put biscuits on a plate and sat around the kitchen table.
“So,” said the woman, who was part of the local community learning disabilities team, “how can I help you?”
My wife and I exchanged weary glances. We had lost count of the health professionals who had asked this very question. But perhaps it was going to be different this time. Our visitor was young and bright-eyed. Would she be the one to finally give us the support we needed? We started telling our story all over again.
It began in 2003, when we adopted Alice, then four months old. For those first few years, you would have described her as determined, boisterous and noisy. In July 2006, we moved from Cambridge to the West Country, and everything changed. Alice would wake in the middle of the night and scream for hours on end. A new problem emerged when she started at the...
Source: ‘A wall built to keep people out’: the cruel, bureaucratic maze of children’s services
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