Just heard Sarah's going to be home late. Hasn't yet left Paces. Don't know what time she'll be in for tea. Transport company being evasive about where her taxi is and likely time to pick her up. Funny same thing happened last Friday.
Next week she's joining her two friends - and soon to be housemates - for afternoon tea, to see their new bungalow. All refurbished and newly painted and kitted out by AbbeyCare. Sarah has chosen lilac for her bedroom colour scheme. The great and probably unique thing about AbbeyCare is that it was set up by parents of a child, now young woman, with cerebral palsy, and their speciality is caring for the younger disabled client with complex health needs in their own homes.
It's good to feel there'll be someone to care for Sarah when in future the taxi is late, as well as the team at Paces.
Sometimes it's hard to take the long view. Just now I'm more concerned about the next few weeks and Sarah leaving home for her new home.
What set me off with this little posting was a comment over on Conductive World, Andrew reflecting on the "inevitably long-term perspectives" of parents, as he draws attention to a posting on a Belgian Conductive Education blog, which Andrew kindly translates on his blog.
It's a familiar story - and worry:
This anxiety refers to a question: what can be the sense of a process of guiding one's children on a along a path... that ultimately takes the form of an dead end? What is the sense of a process that ask someone to go forwards... towards a brick wall.
Unfortunately, the answer is a simple one: there is no sense!
The writer calls it "a brick wall"; we've said it's like "jumping off a cliff" or "hurtling into a void" (which is why we called our young adult group "Leaping the Void"). The challenge is continuity, taking the long-term perspective, the long view, helping young people "into independent adulthood as active citizens" as it says in the header to this blog.
The SEN Green Paper is an odd document, I find; rather muddled and internally contradictory. But it does propose one much needed radical change, the recognition - insistence even - on the importance of individual planning from 0 - 25 years. For me, of course, this raises - as it has at Paces since about 2000 - all sorts of questions about how Sarah (and others in Leaping the Void) should be helped to discover for herself what a 'conductive life' might mean and how 'conductive living' might- or should - replace 'conductive upbringing' or 'conductive pedgagogy'.
I wish our Belgian friends every success as they try to work out how, sustainably, to create "a place for ​conductive pedagogy that can accommodate children up to age 18" .... and beyond, no doubt, to independent citizenship apart from their parents.