Communication matters

One of the first articles I wrote for Disability Now as “Candid Kate” in around 2003 was about my pre-uni nerves.

Four-and-a-half-years and many essay headaches later, I now have letters after my name! I got a yummy 2:1.

I keep telling myself I am too cool and non-geeky (and lazy) to get a golden first; a 2:1, as my friend put it, “is better than average but not too swotty”.

OK, university was not a life-changing, brilliant experience that gave me lifelong friends and I didn’t fall in love with academia. What it did give me was a perfect comeback to the patronising people us crips must regularly put up with (my glamorous silver-haired mate/boss managed to slip the word “graduation” loudly into our conversation when we were walking down a north London street after a lady came out of her house to gawk at the curiosity that was me).

Achieving a degree has been a heck of a journey for me, my family and those who have supported me. This is due to the negative attitudes of people, mostly professionals in the education system, like the headteacher of my special school who once told mum that I wouldn’t be able to achieve at the same level as non-disabled children. Luckily, mum didn’t take a blind bit of notice of him and quickly got me moved.

This special school was for physically disabled kids but I seem to remember that many of the kids had slight cerebral palsy and moderate-to-severe learning difficulties, so everything was set up for people who needed help more with basic skills than physical support, leaving us more intelligent children without the right level of education. And the children who had severe physical disabilities and pretty tricky communication issues had the worst part of the deal, because they were sent to the dump that was the big-time learning-difficulties school, where they were labelled as PMLD.

Now, some of those kids might have had problems with understanding but I worry that a lot of them simply hadn’t had their communication sorted and were just forgotten about.

Consider this: had Stephen Hawking been as disabled at four as he is now and been born to a loving but unaware family and so by default been sent to the PMLD school, and come to you without any communication, how would you know that he was capable of understanding the concept of “mummy”, let alone black holes!

My point is: people with communication impairments still have to prove their abilities time and time again. Why not be optimistic about us for a change?