However, she is deaf. She has also been seriously ill, and because of that she is now in an academic hinterland. She should be in year 13, getting offers for degree courses.
Instead she is at the dining table trying to work to a teaching scheme we have found on an examination board website. Like thousands of disabled children before her, she has been ground down trying to survive mainstream education. After five years at a top state grammar, living on her wits, trying to follow conversations with people whose heads were turned away, being left behind in friendships, straining to listen in class against the backdrop of a humming whiteboard that interfered with her hearing equipment, she just crashed. On some days her cochlear implant would fail and she would go through the day profoundly deaf, talking to no one and no one talking to her. She didn’t ask for help because she didn’t want to bother anyone. I came to recognise those days well, because back at home the words would tumble out of her mouth, and she would laugh and joke and be her normal self. I know what six hours of suppressed verbosity sounds like: it sounds like a heart breaking. By the time she was taking her GCSEs she was showing signs of anxiety. She was taking more and more time off, yet she achieved nine out of nine A* passes. Her anxiety tipped over into panic disorder after her GCSEs when she was diagnosed with food allergies. She became too frightened to eat for fear of an anaphylactic reaction. Finally, when her dad had a stroke, she went into freefall. The results of a survey of the parents of deaf children reveal a picture of confusion and worry During the five years she was there her school was incredibly sympathetic. They had never had a deaf pupil, and all staff underwent deafness awareness training and rallied round. They wanted to help so much, but ultimately they could not tackle the crippling isolation.
