While parents up and down the country are preparing for their children to return to school , getting uniforms ready and booking in last-minute hair trims, there are those for whom September does not herald the same transition. Families with children who do not – and cannot – fit into the traditional school system.
Caro Giles’s family is one of these, though when she became a teacher herself she’d have never anticipated it. “I loved school when I was a kid and assumed, naively, when I had my children that they’d just go to school,” she tells me.
“When my eldest child hated school and was suffering at home, but seemed okay once in the classroom, that was really problematic for me.” At the time, Giles, a single parent living in Northumberland, didn’t know that her daughter Matilda w