To start on a personal note, I can reflect that the club – ‘parents of disabled children’ – was one I didn’t want to join, and yet was shattered to leave with the death of my daughter, aged 17, in February this year. Re-engaging with these issues at this time, I find extremely difficult.

Eduardo-Reyes-2019

The impetus for doing so is the way my experience, and the experience of other families I know, and for those who have them, legal advisers, is being persistently mischaracterised by the bodies that speak for local authorities, and by the Department for Education and the advisers it leans on. A pervasive language is now spoken by them in which ‘needs’ become ‘demands’, upholding of ‘rights’ translates as ‘unsustainable’, desperate parents are ‘pushy’, and councils who consistently delay assessments of children insist on their commitment to ‘early intervention’.