The Fear of Getting It Wrong

One of my earliest memories is of trying to impress my dad with my spellings. I can still recall jumping onto his knee in the lounge and going through them with him, determined to get every one right.

Determined, really, to make him proud.

Looking back, I think I spent quite a lot of my childhood wanting to make somebody proud. To get something right. To be good at something. To hear, well done.

I’m not sure I ever really felt that I achieved it.

When I was about five, I was attending Bradford Girls’ School. I’m sure my parents believed they were giving me the best possible start. It was a private school and, on paper, presumably offered every educational advantage. Looking back, I sometimes wish they had simply sent me to an ordinary state primary school, not that I wish to sound ungrateful.

I think I might have had more friends. I think I might have been happier. And, strangely enough, I sometimes wonder whether I might actually have learned more.

I was born with a serious heart problem, I had major surgery to save my life at 10 months old, and I was regularly having check ups and tests. However, one of my strongest memories of those early years has nothing to do with my heart.

It’s a maths lesson.

I must have been about five, definitely in my first year in the school and probably only a few weeks into term.

We were given a sheet of maths questions and I sat there and did them.

All of them.

I remember thinking they were easy.

That matters, because at that point I didn’t think I was bad at maths. I wasn’t frightened of the page or worrying that I wouldn’t understand it.

Quite the opposite.

I thought I’d got them right.

I finished the sheet, got up and went enthusiastically to the teacher’s desk.

“I’ve done them, Miss.”

She looked through my work.

X

X

X

X

X

They were wrong.

And then, completely out of the blue, she smacked me across the backside and told me to sit back down and do them again.

I don’t recall ever having been hit before in my life.

I was five years old.

The older I get, the more extraordinary I find that memory. Not only because she hit me, but because she didn’t teach me.

I had just confidently completed an entire sheet incorrectly. Surely that should have told her something.

I hadn’t refused to do the work. I hadn’t been messing about. I had done the bloody lot, enthusiastically, perhaps a bit too quickly, probably because I wanted to impress her.

But I genuinely believed I had understood the questions and got them right.

That was the moment somebody could have pulled up a chair and said, “Rachel, show me how you worked this one out.”

Or simply, “Slow down. Let’s look at this together.”

Instead:

Go back and do it again.

Right, but I didn’t know how to do it the first time.

So how exactly was I supposed to get it right the second?

I don’t remember going back to have that paper marked again. I suspect that might have been the point at which I simply gave up, sitting there, scared presumably, and at a loss as to what I had done wrong or how I was now supposed to make it right.

And maths became the subject I hated.

There were other signs that I wasn’t exactly thriving at that school.

In the second year, I wet myself during assembly.

Which, even allowing for the bladder control of a small child, perhaps ought to have been a clue that I wasn’t exactly skipping through the gates every morning shouting, Hurrah, more education!

What I remember is sitting there thinking:

I need the toilet.

I dare not ask.

I might get smacked again.

At the time it was mortifying.

Looking back now, I think:

I must have been bloody terrified of that school.

A year or two later I was sitting beside my best friend, Nicki Finn, in another maths lesson. The teacher was Mrs Saxton. Once again, I didn’t understand the maths, but by then I had discovered a possible escape route.

The toilet.

I put my hand up and asked to go.

Mrs Saxton responded, in front of the class, with something along the lines of:

“Oh yes, we must all let Rachel go to the toilet. After all, she wet herself.”

I must have been six or seven.

Imagine the humiliation.

Not only was I clearly rubbish at maths, apparently my bladder was now part of the curriculum.

Thankfully, my parents moved away and I left that school.

But I didn’t leave maths behind.

At my next school I ended up in the bottom set, with a teacher the rugby lads delighted in calling “Johnny No Balls” -  a play on his actual name -  while chanting it across a classroom he seemed largely unable to control.

Much of the lesson became a complete waste of time.

But, I wanted to learn.

That matters.

I wanted somebody to explain maths in a way that made sense to me. But I couldn’t grasp it, and putting a child who already struggles into the bottom set with a teacher who can barely control the room isn’t necessarily the educational intervention it might appear to be.

I failed maths.

My parents then did what reasonably well-off parents presumably did when the expensive education hadn’t produced the required result.

They spent some more money.

Enter the private maths tutor.

One-to-one tuition. No rugby lads. No Johnny No Balls. No obvious excuses left.

And I still failed maths.

Twice.

It’s only as an adult that I’ve wondered whether perhaps I have dyscalculia. I’ve never been diagnosed. Maybe I have always processed numbers differently. Maybe I missed some fundamental building block very early on.

Or maybe being hit at five for getting maths wrong didn’t exactly help.

It would be rather ironic to discover, more than forty years and two failed maths exams later, that there was actually a reason I couldn’t actually do it.

But the more interesting question to me now is why, despite all those adults, all that education and even private tuition, I don’t remember anybody asking:

Why is she struggling with this?

Not How do we get her to pass?

Why?

Does she process numbers differently?

Has she missed something fundamental?

Does she need to be taught another way?

Is she frightened of getting it wrong?

Nobody ever really found out.

And perhaps that’s why the part of that first maths lesson that stays with me most isn’t even being smacked.

It’s the moment immediately before it.

I can still see that little girl.

She had finished the entire sheet.

She thought she had got it right.

And she was so pleased with herself that she ran up to the desk to show her teacher.

“I’ve done them, Miss.”

That wasn’t a child who didn’t want to learn.

That was a child ready to learn.

More than forty years later, I can’t remember a single question on that sheet. I can’t remember a single answer I wrote.

But I remember running to that desk thinking I’d done well.

I remember the crosses.

And I remember being hit.

The maths disappeared.

The feeling didn’t.

And it has taken me more than forty years to realise that perhaps what stayed with me wasn’t maths at all.

It was the fear of getting it wrong.

Years later, I discovered that adulthood has its own version of the maths paper.

Only nobody smacks you across the backside anymore.

They arrange a meeting.

There are assessments, reviews, care plans, professionals, providers.

And the word all parents of disabled children live in fear of… enter the word “safeguarding”. Perhaps, in some ways, the modern-day equivalent of the smack: something intended to protect, but which can feel like punishment when it is directed at you without anyone first understanding how you got there.

Except these days, getting something “wrong” can have rather greater consequences than a red cross on a page.

In 2002, I became the mother of a child with profound disabilities.

And when you have a child who cannot simply tell the world what she needs, what hurts, what frightens her or what has happened to her, you learn to be her voice.

You learn the smallest things.

A movement, a noise, a facial expression, a change in behaviour. The difference between I’m tired, I’m frightened, I’m in pain and something isn’t right.

You learn because you have to.

Over the years, you accumulate a kind of knowledge that doesn’t come from a textbook or professional qualification.

It comes from thousands upon thousands of hours with one human being.

Then people arrive who may have known your child for weeks, days or sometimes hours, while you have known her for a lifetime.

And yet something strange can happen.

The person with the greatest continuity can become the person under the greatest scrutiny.

When support works, everybody talks about partnership.

When support doesn’t work, the questions can start moving remarkably quickly towards the parent.

Why did you do that?

Why didn’t you do this?

Why are you complaining?

Why are you questioning the professionals?

Why aren’t you coping?

And eventually, sometimes:

Safeguarding.

Safeguarding is essential. Of course it is. People with disabilities who cannot communicate easily are particularly vulnerable and absolutely must be protected.

But safeguarding should never become a shortcut for failing to examine what has happened around a family (a bit like smacking became the short cut for that teacher).

There is a terrible irony when a parent spends years filling gaps in services, compensating for inadequate support, coordinating care and desperately trying to keep their child safe, only to find that when everything begins to buckle, somebody turns around and asks whether the problem might be the parent.

And I know exactly what that feeling is.

X

You’re doing that wrong.

X

You’re too involved.

X

You’re difficult.

X

You’re not coping.

The red pen has changed. The feeling hasn’t.

There is an impossible standard that parents of disabled children can find themselves trying to meet.

Know your child intimately but don’t think you know more than the professional.

Advocate for them but don’t advocate too loudly.

Challenge poor care but remain cooperative.

Ask for help but don’t appear unable to cope.

Accept services but if those services fail, somehow continue filling the gaps.

Be exhausted but never so exhausted that anybody questions whether you can continue caring.

And above all:

Get it right.

Except nobody can get all of that right.

Particularly when the system around them isn’t getting it right either.

And this is where I think we often misunderstand what social-care failure looks like.

It doesn’t always arrive as one enormous catastrophic event.

Sometimes it is cumulative.

A service doesn’t materialise. A care package isn’t sufficient. Staff change. Information isn’t passed on. A concern isn’t acted upon. Another meeting is arranged. Yet another assessment takes place. Another professional arrives.

The parent fills the gap.

Then another.

Then another.

Until eventually the parent isn’t merely part of the care arrangement.

They are the infrastructure holding it up.

And when that person finally says, I cannot keep doing this, we should be very careful about what happens next.

Because I cannot continue doing the work of an entire system is not the same sentence as I cannot care for my child.

I need help is not evidence that somebody needs safeguarding.

Imagine saying at work, I need help. I appear to be doing the jobs of ten people and I cannot sustain this, and instead of your employer examining the workload, somebody opens an investigation into you.

Yet families can find themselves in a version of precisely that position.

This service isn’t working is not evidence that the parent is difficult or that they are failing their child.

Sometimes this service isn’t working means exactly what it says:

The service isn’t working.

Whether that is SEND, health or social care, the system has failed to provide what that disabled person and their family needed.

That is where the little girl with the maths paper comes back to me.

Because when I was five, an adult looked at the wrong answers and punished the child.

She didn’t ask how I’d arrived at them.

She didn’t ask whether I’d been taught properly.

She didn’t ask whether I understood.

She looked at the outcome.

Wrong.

And perhaps social care sometimes needs to resist doing exactly the same thing.

When a family is struggling, don’t simply examine the parent standing in front of you.

Look backwards.

Look at the care that was promised.

Look at what was actually delivered.

Look at the gaps.

Look at the warnings.

Look at the hours that parent or relative has been carrying.

Look at what happened before they became exhausted, angry, frightened or desperate enough to start shouting that something was wrong.

Because sometimes the person who appears to be struggling isn’t the cause of the failure.

Sometimes they’re the person who has been preventing the failure from becoming visible.

Today the stakes are considerably higher than a page of maths.

Because when the person being scrutinised is the parent or relative of somebody with profound disabilities, particularly somebody who cannot easily speak for themselves, being labelled as getting it wrong can have enormous consequences.

And the accusation doesn’t necessarily stop at:

You got it wrong.

It can become something infinitely more painful:

You failed them.

You failed the person you love.

Three words capable of wiping away, in an instant, years or even decades of everything that came before them.

The sleepless nights.

The appointments.

The hospital admissions.

The medications.

The battles for services.

The meetings.

The forms.

The phone calls.

The care nobody else saw.

The things you gave up.

The times you carried on when you had absolutely nothing left.

So perhaps before reaching for the metaphorical red pen, we should ask a different question.

Not simply:

What did this parent get wrong?

But:

What did the system fail to give them that might have helped them get it right?

And sometimes, perhaps, the most uncomfortable question of all:

Was the parent actually getting it wrong — or were they the person left trying to hold together everything that everybody else had got wrong?

Because there is an enormous difference between failing the person you love and being failed while trying to care for them.

Perhaps that is what takes me all the way back to the little girl standing beside the teacher’s desk.

She thought she had done it right.

The teacher saw the mistakes.

X

X

X

X

And more than forty years later, perhaps the fear isn’t simply of getting something wrong anymore.

It is the fear that somebody else will decide you got it wrong and reduce everything you have done for the person you love to three devastating words:

You failed them.