I have developed my powers of vision and strategy. I am more assertive, more focussed, more analytical. Disabled by care responsibilities, I am more positive about a way to work with them. Kate was motivated to join the School by a sense of injustice that children with disabilities caused by medical treatment in infancy, were not receiving the lifelong care that their conditions required. The separation of medical and social service budgets and benefits meant that a one-off medical cost could lead to lifelong care that parents couldn't afford.
Scant resources are available direct to parents to make their own arrangements.
The medical condition quickly leads to disability for the whole family, social exclusion, poverty, exclusion from the workplace through the lack of affordability of special needs childcare, civil rights infringements and mental health problems. Kate has such a child and she and her family have been affected in this way. Through her year with SSE, Kate developed a new organisation providing special needs playschemes in holidays and lobbied Devon statutory providers for increased boarding provision for children who go away from their homes and their communities. In this field, she feels that working with the statutory agencies is the only way to proceed so as to be able to create provision that is sustainable long-term. Kate also sits on a European-funded research group investigating the provision for autism across Europe.