Newbold Hope in collaboration with
Not Fine in School
Newbold Hope and Not Fine in School are excited to be bringing you this premier viewing of their collaboration webinar:
Barriers to Attendance: How to Respond when your Child CANNOT go to School
Yvonne Newbold MBE is the founder of Newbold Hope, a parent-led organisation inspired by Toby, one of Yvonne’s three children, and all he helped her learn throughout his childhood and beyond.
Newbold Hope provides help, support, training and hope to parents and professionals who care for children and young people who have a disability or an additional need, and who also sometimes become so overwhelmed that their behaviour becomes difficult and dangerous.
Due to this work, there are now over 3,000 families who have already successfully worked with their children or young people to significantly reduce their episodes of extreme behaviour and moving towards much happier times with much more promising futures ahead.
Yvonne also works closely with NHS England on a number of teams responsible for shaping National Policy and Strategy for children and adults with a learning disability or who are autistic. These include the NHS Assembly, The Dynamic Support Register Working Groups and The National Steering Group for children and young people. Yvonne is also the author of the Amazon number one bestseller “The Special Parent’s Handbook”.
Yvonne is also living with incurable Stage 4 cancer and has been on continuous cancer treatment for over 10 years. All of her work with Newbold Hope has developed from her “bucket list” wish to do what she could to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of families of children with disabilities and additional needs. As well as being awarded an MBE in the 2021 New Year’s Honours List for this work, she has also won a number of awards.
Beth Bodycote has lived experience of parenting children navigating school attendance barriers. Her younger son experienced separation anxiety and social anxiety through most of his school years. Then after no apparent difficulties at primary school, her eldest son suddenly became unable to attend at the transition to secondary school. Beth’s search for information and support at this stressful time led her to discover social media support groups, and to experience the benefit of contact with other parents in similar situations.
From that point Beth became increasingly involved in sharing peer support within Facebook groups. Seeing so many families experiencing similar difficulties accessing help when children struggle with school attendance sparked a drive and passion to make a difference, and in 2012 she enrolled as a mature student on an Education Studies degree.
In 2017, Beth established a Facebook group called Not Fine in School which has grown to a current membership of over 34,000 parents and carers. With the involvement of a team of similarly passionate parents, Not Fine in School aims to empower their membership through shared lived experience and peer support. Furthermore, in partnership with Square Peg, Not Fine in School also works to raise awareness of family perspectives to influence change in the systemic responses to absence from school.
In 2022, Beth completed a PhD where her research explored the experiences of 40 parents when they sought to resolve school attendance barriers.
Barriers to Attendance: How to respond when your child cannot go to school.
Sunday, 11th December 2022 between 8.00 and 10.00pm
What do you do when your child or young person becomes distressed at the thought of going to school? What happens when they simply cannot attend? It may be that they can’t face school for a day or so here or there, or they may stop going for weeks or months. What if it doesn’t look like you’ll ever get them back through the school gates?
This is an issue that is affecting thousands of families all over the country. It's an incredibly emotional issue that’s shrouded in shame, but seldom discussed and often ignored and swept right under the carpet. When it does get talked about, more often than not the parents are blamed and the children may be seen as trouble-making delinquents.
There’s so much more behind the reasons why children and young people may develop an inability to go to school, but most people can’t see the real reasons why. If it happens to your child, chances are you’ll feel lost, out-of-your-depth and as if you are somehow failing as a parent. Yet it’s very seldom a parent’s fault and it’s highly unlikely to be the child’s fault either.
This live online webinar is a joint project between Newbold Hope and Not Fine In School, two parent-led organisations which both support parents when things are extremely difficult due to difficult or dangerous behaviour or with school attendance. Yvonne Newbold MBE will lead the session which takes a realistic view of what’s really going on, why it’s so poorly understood, and what you can do to support your child in the best way possible. It’s packed with workable strategies and ideas that can really help to make things better.
Here are just some of the topics we’ll be looking at -
- Who are the stakeholders – the important players – when a child can’t attend school?
- How do each group of stakeholders view non-attendance
- What does this mean for children and their families?
- What are parents often told to do?
- The law regarding school non-attendance
- What works and what doesn’t
- What’s really going on?
- What you can do to help
- How to get other stakeholders onside
- Where to seek help
- How to counter parent-blame
- How to best support your child
- Top tips to get through this
Please join us if you can – this is the first time that this wealth and breadth of information is available to parents in this webinar format, and to celebrate our premier viewing of this webinar topic, you can book for the special offer price of only £5.00 for the two-hour session. By booking, you’ll also get access to the recordings for 4 weeks afterwards, so this can help you and your child into the first term of 2023.
Please click on this link to buy your ticket: