YEAR 10 STUDENT’S MOTHER END OF YEAR COMMUNICATION

As it’s coming to the end of the school year I wanted to express my gratitude to you and the Inventorium program.
 

Thank you feels so inadequate for what you have done for our son and our family. He has come SUCH a long way since we started at the beginning of 2022. Looking back then, he was in burnout. Simply saying the words “school work or teacher” would trigger a panic attack and he was completely debilitated by the idea of having to participate in any form of schooling. Now he has just completed a survey which expresses his hope to go on to further study post school and pursue a career in a field that inspires him. Your understanding of his disability and just how it impacts not just his ability to engage in learning but his day to day life has been the key to keeping him in school.
 

Inventorium is the space in the middle for families whose kids are just not coping in face to face learning but their parents are not in a position to provide home schooling. I honestly cannot tell you how this program has saved our family. Because of you taking the time to build a rapport with Josh, give him the space when he needed it and then have the resources on hand ready when he stepped up, you gave our son the gift of a safe learning space. His PDA brain desperately needed to feel he had control over his school work and you gave him that by allowing him to choose the topics and deliver the lessons in a format that felt purposeful and had meaning to him. This then allowed him to participate on his terms. He has so many barriers due to his PDA and your approach and understanding meant that you work with him collaboratively. You scaffold him in such a way that he can produce work and this has gifted him the opportunity to continue learning at his pace. There is absolutely no way that he would have considered remaining in school for year 11 and 12 if you had sent him work, told him he failed if he hadn’t been able to deliver and fed a narrative in his mind of “I can’t”. Instead your patience, kindness and understanding demonstrated your acceptance of the limitations he has whilst recovering from burnout and he has not been shamed for not “keeping up” with everyone else.
 

Your support of me as a struggling parent has been invaluable. My husband and I are university educated and to see our son struggle so much and feeling so powerless to help was a huge source of grief for us. Please know that you have helped us to realise that learning is LIFE LONG. I have found peace with the fact that his journey is different to that of most children. His anxiety is so severe that his focus needed (still does) to be cantered around coping with day to day life. If he lacks the coping skills to stay regulated when his expectations aren’t met or plans change with little warning then he has little capacity to participate in a more broad and diverse education. Coupled with teenage hormones that elevate everything to an 11 on the catastrophe scale, it takes a miracle for him to feel secure enough to focus and yet this year he has managed not only to do more school work but he actually ASKED for more work, understanding that education is important and because he wasn’t shamed for when he couldn’t participate as much as he wanted to. He felt safe enough to stretch himself once he was ready. He surprised both of us and when he inevitably swung back into a more overwhelmed state, you also gave him space to get his head back to where it needed to be. This is what inclusiveness looks like. He deserves the opportunity for an education but being able to deliver it on his timeframe is the challenge and yet you have done exactly that.
 

I have seen stories on the news around the struggles of other “School Can’t” families and I feel so incredibly lucky to have been recommended Inventorium and gifted you. I cringe to think what our life would look like now if we were still trying to make our son attend school. I honestly don’t know that he would still be here. The pressure of strict school attendance breaks families and for kids like our son and many others it is not ok that a system that is supposed to give a child a life of opportunities, in reality breaks them before life has really begun by simply expecting more than what they are capable of. I wonder how many kids are sitting in juvenile detention because they just couldn’t cope in the traditional school system, were told they were bad because of it and so find themselves in trouble because they have no one saying that they are capable and worth waiting for. The ripple effect is huge and life long.
 

Because you are the one delivering our son’s school work, I have been able to stay in the workforce. I can financially contribute to our family and this in turn has afforded us the chance to move into our new home this year. We both know just how hard moving was for our son and I wondered at the time if it was the right thing but now I cannot imagine being anywhere else. Our family has gone from surviving (barely) to thriving. Our son’s capacity has grown progressively over the year and he is wanting to set himself new goals and knows that he has a team of people backing him all the way. He no longer says “I can’t, I’m too stupid to learn”, now he asks to do drawing courses and feels pride in producing work that reflects what he is actually capable of. You did that.
 

I hope you realise that by not placing unrealistic expectations on a child whose disability is not seen and rarely understood, you have given him hope and belief in himself. That is what the definition of a teacher is. Not a tick box of requirements met.