Editorial and Opinion
Peter Limbrick

A brief discussion of the power structures within which parents and professionals operate, with the conclusion that part of the true role of professionals is to equip families for their future life with the child.
1496 words

p1

Lead Article - Team Around the Child at work in Australia
Sue Davies

The basis of the innovative, service delivery model developed by Kurrajong Early Intervention Service (KEIS) is the family-centred, transdisciplinary teamwork of the Team-Around-the-Child (TAC) approach developed in the UK. As there has been limited research into early childhood intervention models in Australia, the project, named the Rural Beginnings Project, has significant implications for future practice. This paper will outline the research base behind KEIS’s early childhood intervention model and will show how an early intervention service in Australia has made the TAC approach work in both regional and smaller rural areas in Australia.
1992 words

p4

Josh’s Story
Kimberley Reid

Kimberley and her son Josh have been supported by the same Kurrajong Early Intervention Service that features in the lead article in this issue of IQJ by Sue Davies. Kimberley describes how a good service became even better when the outreach service was established. This development gave Josh improved opportunities for learning, saved the family much stress, time and money, and supported Josh in his transition into mainstream school.
1800 words

p10

Parent-child interaction as focus for early intervention: experience from early-age Conductive Education
Wendy Baker and Andrew Sutton

Early-age Conductive Education developed as a means to activate young children whose motor disorders impeded interactions with their material and especially social worlds upon which social and psychological development depend (reciprocity). Parent-and-child intervention teaches children together with their parents, enhanced by implementation in small groups. Experience at the National Institute of Conductive Education dates back fifteen years and has also involved a range of disabling conditions beyond motor disorders, including intellectual disorders. The approach is compatible with the thinking of major theorists in psychology (Vygotsky, Wallon, Feuerstein, Bronfenbrenner, Dalto). Given lack of demonstrable efficacy for existing approaches to early intervention, a research methodology is proposed for evaluating this psycho-social family-based intervention.
3523 words (Two halves of 1954 and 1569 words)

p14

Dads and Dinghies: How Limelight Fathers and Children’s Group engages fathers in a Family Learning Centre
Tim Neville

In this article Tim Neville describes the work undertaken by the Lewisham Branch of the Pre-school Learning Alliance in engaging fathers into Limelight Family Learning Centre. The article follows various strategies to try and involve fathers in their children’s development and learning.
1163 words

p23

Postural Care Provision – Current policies and objectives
Anna Goldsmith

Postural Care, otherwise known as Protection of Body Shape is a fundamental unmet health need for people with a movement difficulty. This article will discuss current service provision and how it can be seen to be failing many individuals and their families. It will also discuss the moral and legal reasons why investment in self-advocates, families, Personal Assistants and those within an individual’s first circle of support, is the only way to ensure that we protect body shape, muscle tone, and most importantly, quality of life for individuals with a movement difficulty.
1362 words

p27

An alphabet of helpful hints: For new practitioners offering family-centred support to children with disabilities / special needs
Peter Limbrick

B is for Balance.
2017 words

p32

Families look to their preschool for support. But who will support preschool staff?
Carolyn Blackburn

In November 2007 Worcestershire Pre-School Learning Alliance undertook a Practitioner-Led Research Project funded by the Children’s Workforce Development Council to discover what support parents need when their child is diagnosed with an illness or disability. The research project also looked at how preschool staff support children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) attending their settings and their families. Questionnaires were sent to 30 families and 100 preschools. A total of 8 families and 44 preschools responded. In addition 7 families and 10 preschools provided face-to-face interviews. The following report draws on that research to discuss the services available to preschools from other agencies to facilitate them in supporting children with SEN and their families.
1849 words

p37

A town like Alice – A diary
Deborah Berkeley

Alice was born 19 months ago. Deborah has kindly agreed to keep this diary to report on what has happened in their family life so far and, in future issues of the IQJ, to keep us up to date with developments. Deborah, Vince, Alex and Alice are pseudonyms, but all locations are real.
857 words

Parents as Keyworkers
Michelle Mould

Michelle’s thirteen-year-old daughter was diagnosed with autism ten years ago. Michelle describes how she reached a point of having to take back control because ‘I couldn’t keep facing the days feeling helpless, useless and with no relationship with my daughter’. She did this by becoming her own keyworker. Michelle argues in this essay that every keyworker should be equipped to empower parents to be their own keyworker – if and when they want this and are ready for it.
2257 words

Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of the Interconnections Quarterly Journal. IQJ is the newest part of the Interconnections Information Service and is designed for everyone who works with babies, children and young people who have special needs – and their families.....

Opinion
Andrew Sutton

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world, and every week on Radio 4’s Today programme John Humphrys determinedly challenges government ministers and other worthies to explain what their clichés and gobbledegook actually mean. For without real meaning policies are unrealisable, and they and their perpetrators are just that little more unaccountable. That goes for all of us......

Lead article - When parents are in denial
Shirley Young

Parents, extended family, friends and professionals use a variety of coping mechanisms in their lives with disabled babies and children. One of the most helpful, but seemingly least understood and most maligned, is denial. It is essential that parents are supported to adopt coping mechanisms or strategies which are healthiest for them and their child. Professionals need to be extremely self-aware and use supervision and support to ensure that they do not adopt coping mechanisms that are detrimental to their effective relationships with parents. Professionals must understand why parents use the strategies they do, and work in a supportive and compassionate way to move them to those which do least harm. They must be absolutely clear about their responsibility not to support strategies that might be working for the parents but which are detrimental to the wellbeing of the disabled child or other children in the family.
5502 words

Our first two years with Bertie
Mary

In this essay Mary reflects on the first two years with her baby Bertie. She describes unhelpful attitudes and practices she encountered in some professionals and contrasts her experiences in the NHS with her experiences in a hospice. The names are not real.
1907 words

Reflections of a Year 11 school leaver with Asperger’s Syndrome: an interpretive account
Pat Bennett

John has an autistic spectrum condition and was admitted to a mainstream school during Year 8 after a number of exclusions from other schools. This essay reports John’s memories and opinions of his experiences in that school and identifies factors which helped him cope with his identified problems. John left at the end of Year 11 with some GCSEs and a place in the local FE college.
4643 words

Siblings:
(i) My life with my older brother
Ethel
(ii) My job as a Project Worker for a sibling support service
Emma Dobson

There are two articles: The first is by Ethel (not her real name) who has written a diary over her half-term holiday about life at home with her older brother. The second, written by a Project Worker for a Sibling Support Service, describes support work with children and young people who have a disabled brother or sister.
1226 words

Making sense of relationships, bodies, love and sex: Communicating through the use of 3D models
Jane Fraser

This article describes an experimental method of addressing the need for young adults with learning disabilities to acquire social skills relevant to current youth culture if they are fully to access the social scene with dignity and remain safe. It then gives an account of the teaching materials used for this project.
1663 words

An alphabet of helpful hints: For new practitioners offering family-centred support to children with disabilities / special needs
Peter Limbrick

This will be a regular feature in IQJ. The alphabet will cover issues which have arisen repeatedly in my consultancy and training work over the last 12 years. The suggestions humbly offered here come from my experience as a sibling of a man with severe cerebral palsy, as a teacher of children with disabilities / special needs, and as a keyworker in the 1990s with families of neurologically-impaired babies and young children.
This issue: A is for Avoid Assumptions. A is for Anticipate. A is for Ask.
1616 words

If it’s not everyone, it’s not inclusion: When a child is vulnerable to being seen as different because of disfigurement, everyone needs to be involved in promoting inclusion at school
Jane Frances

At Changing Faces we work with children and young people who have conditions, injuries or illness that affect the way they look, and with their families and their schools. If we want schools and life after school to become more and more accessible and inclusive then schools have a vital job to do in enabling everyone to be more comfortable and confident around disfigurement and disability.
2592 words

A town like Alice – A diary
Deborah Berkeley

Alice was born 19 months ago. Deborah has kindly agreed to keep this diary to report on what has happened in their family life so far and, in future issues of the IQJ, to keep us up to date with developments. Deborah, Vince, Alex and Alice are pseudonyms, but all locations are real.
1794 words

The TAC (team around the child) approach for assessment of needs within a local multi-agency integrated pathway
Peter Limbrick

The Interconnections Manual ‘An Integrated Pathway for Assessment and Support for children with complex needs and their families’ (Limbrick, 2003) describes how health, education, social services and the voluntary/private sector can work together to provide children who have complex needs and their families with an effective service. This essay is adapted and updated from particular sections of that Manual and will touch first on the integrated pathway and will then focus on assessment of needs. In pursuit of the earliest possible support to child and family, I suggest two strategies for the assessment of needs: the simpler and more immediate TAC, or first level, assessment and the more explorative second level assessment which involves more practitioners and is relevant to a minority of children. (A child’s TAC is an individualised team of parent and just two or three key practitioners who hold regular face-to-face meetings.)
3500 words

Good practice in Lewisham: The multi-agency planning pathway (MAPP)
Ann Wallace

In this article Ann Wallace describes the Lewisham MAPP team’s journey over the last three years in developing their own way of putting the idea of ‘working together’ into practice, describes the rationale and principles of the MAPP process, and shows some of the learning they have experienced on their journey.
3276 words