The Telegraph – Jenny Hulme
” Katherine Long can’t remember the actual moment when her wonder in her son’s ability and love of learning turned into a worry. Or when she started losing confidence in herself and her parenting, and faced every school meeting trying to hold it together, to stop the tears, when she sat down to discuss “how Josh was doing”. Josh was seven when he moved from a local primary school, where he had been happy but frustrated, into a carefully chosen school that promised small classes and the chance to thrive, says Katherine, a doctor from Sussex. “Josh had always been so articulate – he was reading by the age of three, conversing with adults like a child more than twice his age,” she says. “It was like he couldn’t switch his brain off. We could see he was longing to go a bit faster, learn a bit more. But after a year at the new school he seemed unsettled and was talking about boys hurting and taunting him.” When Katherine shared her concerns with Josh’s teachers, they treated her reports as Josh’s problem rather than the school’s, saying they saw no evidence of bullying in class and calling on her to challenge Josh’s “idiosyncrasies”, suggesting he was triggering problems by “always putting his hand up” or by being “oversensitive” to normal playground banter.”(more)