Page 72 - SEN115 - November/December 2021

SLCN
Campaigning for the right to
speak and be heard
Steve Hermon gives an account of how he began his journey as a campaigner for speech and language therapies to be given greater support
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May 2019 was a month that sticks in my memory for a few reasons. Wolves (the football team I support) qualified for Europe for the first time in forty years, our son Eddie celebrated his 4th birthday and
an event was organised that would help me more than the organisers will ever know.
I was on the train to work at BBC Radio WM in Birmingham and saw loads of Mums and children carrying posters with various slogans on. I realised they were attending a SEND Crisis March I’d read about. It was being held to raise awareness of the issues facing parents and their children with special needs and disabilities.
I briefly walked through Victoria Square to see the event being set up and carried on into work to read the news. A short time later, one of our reporters went to cover the demonstration for us. She sent back an interview with one of the organisers, Kate Taylor. Listening to it provided a huge turning point in my own journey as a parent of a child with SEND. On that day she said:
“The words were tough to listen to but they were what I needed to hear”
“When you have a child with special needs and disabilities, there’s an element of grieving that takes place, so when you first get your diagnosis or you’re first aware of it, you have to let go of the child you spent your life dreaming you were going to have and you have a whole new journey and that journey is equally beautiful and equally amazing but it’s different and there is a period of adjustment and that’s very hard and often very, very isolating.”
I played those words on the radio in my bulletin but after the red ‘on air’ light went off, the words sank in. I sat there and I cried... because she was right. I dreamt of having a son, who I would take to Molineux to watch Wolves. I’d watch him play for a Sunday league team and he’d get married, have kids and carry on the Hermon name in our family tree. The words were tough to listen to but they were what I needed to hear at that time. I knew he was ‘different’ but I had not fully accepted that we had a child with special needs and I was struggling with the reality that our boy wasn’t speaking when other children were.
That’s despite our SEND journey being well underway by this point. We were in the middle of the EHCP process and had visited special schools that Eddie might attend later that year. My wife Kate is to thank for that. She stayed focused, booking the visits and constantly spoke with Council officers to make sure the paperwork went through. Ultimately, she accepted the situation a lot quicker than I did and crucially spoke to her friends about it. I didn’t speak to mine. I didn’t think they’d find it interesting during a chat over a pint. At home, I also didn’t want to let on to Kate that I was struggling. Instead I did the worst thing and bottled up my feelings. I guess I isolated myself and hadn’t gone through that ‘grieving process’ Kate Taylor referenced.
We don’t have a diagnosis as of writing but Eddie’s primary need is speech and language. He wasn’t hitting those milestones
■ Simon and his son Eddie.
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