This is the best summary I could come up with:
“For some people, the role of parenting has changed - 100%,” she says.Educational experts and teaching unions say the forced closure of schools during the pandemic meant some families lost sight of the value of education.
“When we're digging into the background problems now, we're noticing that things are getting more complex for a lot of children and families,” says Nikki Morrison, a school welfare officer for 20 years, who leads a team of eight.“We’ve higher rates of parental mental health issues, we've got the cost of living crisis, we've got children who are on waiting lists to be assessed for autism and ADHD, who are quite clearly struggling in the educational environment that they've been placed in, because it's not the right environment for them.”For the past two years, Ms Morrison has been working with Harley.
For us to be able to put the support in place for students just to simply be able to come through the doors can be a challenge.”The Charlton School has access to Nikki Morrison’s team of welfare officers, but also has seven of its own.
A key problem they face is the increasing number of students who are presenting with ADHD or autism, or other neurodivergent conditions.According to Andrew McNaughton those children can wait more than two years for a formal diagnosis.
Nikki Morrison is always optimistic that her staff can find solutions - she has even cajoled her husband into helping, getting him trained to be an exam invigilator so he can supervise students sitting GCSEs at home.
But she wonders what will happen to these students when they get older.“If we haven't brought children through the system who are resilient and ready for the next level, who's going to pick this group up - young people who’ve spent most of the last five or six years sporadically in and out of education, or having a bespoke timetable where they've been away from their peers and they've become quite socially isolated?“Somebody is going to have to pick up that group when they leave school and try to put in the support to enable them to be productive and functional members of society.”Additional reporting by Daniel Wainwright and Callum Thomson
The original article contains 1,551 words, the summary contains 367 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!