Divergent Learning Diaries

The Covid lockdowns took place before my daughters (twins, 9 years old at the time) received their AuDHD diagnoses.  Instinctively, when school closures were announced in March 2020,  I felt that some time away from school, at home could be really good, not just for them, but also for us as a family.  I had been finding the balance of work and raising our girls increasingly challenging.  Motivating them to get dressed, leave the house and just do life was becoming unwieldy.  It felt like an opportunity to cocoon ourselves.  To heal.

In the first lockdown we managed some of this. As a school leader I was a key worker so we ran a school for children of other key workers and also invited our most vulnerable learners into school to offer them the benefits of good learning routines.  For some reason, and I can’t say why even now, I rejected the offer of sending my own children to their own key worker provision (my husband is also a key worker) preferring to split shifts with him and try some home schooling.  What started off as an adventure, with timetabled days and structured learning opportunities gradually unravelled and gave way to a lot more play than work.  You may remember that it was a long summer and while the country struggled to manage the pandemic, those confined to their homes, the lucky ones with outdoor spaces, enjoyed  beautiful sunny weather.  Ultimately we let go of learning routines and just let the girls be kids.

Patti and Joni did not return to school until September and by that point it felt like we all needed some sort of routine back.  They returned to what was their Year 5 and picked up the school routine pretty well.  Sure, getting moving again took some work but they attended every day and all was good.  

However, in January 2021, one day after students returned from the Christmas break, the inevitable second lockdown was initiated by the government.  Schools closed again. We all drew breath.  We felt, for some reason that I just can’t pinpoint, that this time around was going to be more challenging.  It wasn’t just me.  Colleagues and friends felt it too.  

We realised that we needed to grow our key worker provision and offer more students the opportunity access school routine.  The demand from key worker parents was greater this time and, with a deal of attention paid to safety and hygiene controls, we grew our special provision.  This meant that both my husband and I  needed to be in work more so we decided to send Patti and Joni to their own school key worker provision.  

They attend for a couple of days.  No more.  I dropped them off in the playground.  It wasn’t the same as normal school.  The arrangements were completely different.  They used different buildings and students were mixing in vertical year groups.  The evenings after those key worker days were full of tears and dysregulated behaviour.  There was a lot of upset that seemed disproportionate but I knew this wasn’t going to work.  Here were some early signs that I missed.  That our girls couldn’t cope in the way the majority were seeming to.

So, I called in a few favours and decided it would be a good idea to set up a school on our site for our own children.  The children of staff.  This was relatively simple to put together using teachers and teaching assistants we had available and I felt some sense of relief that I could keep my children close.  They weren’t quite themselves anymore and at least this way I could keep an eye on them.

Joni had always been the ‘easier’ of the two girls.  Quiet, compliant, sweet natured.  The kind of kid that did sweet things that made your heart melt.  Joni and her sister came in with me every day, set up ‘school’  in the provision we had created and joined the online lessons that her own school had started to offer students.  The change in Joni was gradual.  Kind of.  Well, by the end of around 3 weeks Joni had traded in her sweet and soft persona for that of a raging tyrant.  

I watched the whole thing aghast.  The staff at my school were surprised to note that one of the headteachers’ daughters was a real handful. Raised eyebrows. Her dysregulated behaviour began to extend to yelling at the teacher and calling her names.  She had never done this before.  The final nail in the coffin for Joni’s attendance at our little provision was when she walked along the row of students, who were dutifully plugged into their own online lessons,  and whacked each one on the back of the head. I was mortified, colleagues were uncomfortable and disapproving.  So, I decided that Patti could stay put but Joni needed out.  Quickly.  I decided that she would work out of my office.  I cleared Joni a desk space near me and brought all of her pens and pencils.   I set up her laptop so she could access school via Gmeet.  Yes.  She could sit by me and access her remote learning under my watchful eye.  

She only managed one remote lesson.  This was a maths lesson.  I watched horrified as my daughter kept shouting the answers interrupting the teacher and becoming distressed and cross.  She was muted by the teacher but undeterred, yelling into some kind of internet ether.  Joni shouted at the screen, put her hands over her ears and screamed because the teacher was moving too fast. She ultimately smashed the laptop against the wall.  

Tears streaming down her face. Irregular breathing.  What on earth was happening?  She couldn’t do this.  She couldn’t make this shift in learning approach.  The whole experience was clearly causing her harm.

I contacted the school to let them know what had been going on.  They didn’t recognise the child I was describing.  They were confused but offered her some sessions on site with the school mentor which we took up.  

As we had done in the first lockdown, we withdrew any pressure on the children to learn.  Patti wasn’t happy being away from her sister and instead I just brought them into school and they played, watched movies and basically roamed.  

When I returned Joni to school on 8 March 2021 I was delivering back a completely different human to the one they had known before.  It was as though we had systematically removed every structure and routine that Joni knew and had  learned to function by since she was tiny.  Our big mistake was assuming she was going to reconstruct routines that had been unlearned. Just like that.  While her peers seemed to manage to do this at least in part for Joni it was not possible.  

Her experience of school never returned to the one she knew before the pandemic.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that Joni spent year 6 under a table.  She liked it there. She had a  blanket she could put over her head.  She couldn’t bear to be in the classroom but the school SEND team were kind and found a safe place to let her just ‘be’. 

Within a week after returning to school we got her onto a waiting list for an autism and ADHD assessment and around 9 months later she received her diagnosis.

Pre-COVID Joni, used to cry if she did the wrong thing in a classroom.  She was the perfect child.  I can’t imagine the herculean effort this must have required day in day out.   It breaks my heart just to think about it.  Post-COVID Joni bares little similarity to her former alter-ego. 

This is Joni unleashed.  She questions, argues, challenges, melts down and gets herself into lots of scrapes. She stands her ground. She is probably best described as a part time student (she probably attends about 70% of lessons and still uses a  quiet space to recharge when she needs to though, not quite so often under tables.  Four years on she’s in Year 9 and she’s starting to find her way.  It’s taken a while to know how to best support Neurodivergent Joni but I think it’s fair to say that we are getting there.

THe COVID pandemic was so awful for so many.  I wouldn’t dream of equating the challenges we faced with those on the NHS frontline and of those who tragically lost loved ones to the virus.  That shared sense of pain and loss motivates the sadness I feel when I remember those two years.

However, I do wonder what would have happened if Joni’s schooling and sense of normalcy has not been disrupted.  If we hadn’t been forced to try another way.  If the closing of schools had not systematically pulled apart all she had learnt about how to function socially and educationally.  A Neurodivergent child who was pretty much nailing it as a ‘Neurotypical’ one.  Would we have discovered by now?

I am in no doubt that the circumstances around the pandemic, particularly in the closure of schools, hastened us realising that Joni  is autistic.  I find it odd that there is not more documented linking the closure of familiar school settings speeding up unveiling of the symptoms associated with Neurodivergent conditions.  There are other theories linking the supposed ‘rise’ in autism diagnoses during the pandemic with an increase in severe maternal infections (The Transmitter, ‘As the pandemic wanes will autism diagnoses rise in its wake?) and there are plenty of studies highlighting the difficulties experienced by children already diagnosed with autism during that period.

I guess we will never know for sure when we would have truly seen Joni unleashed, in her true colours.  Despite the difficulties the diagnosis journey has brought, we wouldn’t put Joni back in her perfectly behaved little box for anything.  New Joni, might be more of a handful, but she is real.   She is her.  She is truly beautiful.  Like a rainbow.