My first conversation had to be with Amy Denbee. Amy is the teacher who changed everything for our family.
We were looking for a new school in the middle of a very difficult transition. Em had left her previous setting convinced that school was not safe and that adults would not help her.
We had moved hours away from everything we knew and our established life and started again in the countryside. We had a young baby, my husband and I were exhausted and I was carrying the feeling, which has never entirely left me, that I had failed her.
Amy met all of that on a video call before she ever met us in person. In this conversation she is honest about what she was actually thinking at the time. Would we turn out to be nightmare parents?
What she offered us was simple and powerful.
She would be open, she would be honest, and she would tell us the truth in any direction. We talk about what she saw in Em on the first day and how a child who arrived braced for conflict slowly learned that the adults in the room would listen to her.
Then there is THE question. Somewhere in that first year Amy asked me whether I had ever considered that Em might be neurodivergent. It is the question that started everything and it is not a question most teachers feel able to ask.
Amy explains why she asked it, what she had noticed and what it costs a teacher to raise this with a parent who may not be ready to hear it.
Amy is dyslexic herself, identified only at university, having spent years assuming she was simply not clever enough. She talks about how that shapes what she notices in a classroom and what teacher training in the UK does and does not prepare you for. We also talk honestly about class sizes, about the quiet child who never gets flagged because they are not causing anyone a problem and about why so many parents of neurodiverse children end up making real sacrifices to find a room with fewer children in it.
At the end of the episode, Em has a message of her own to share.
In this episode I hope teachers will relate to this truly honest conversation that is filled with love, respect and admiration for the transformative force they are in our children's lives.