Member

If one were going to write a script for a television play where one tried to emphasise just how difficult these situations can be, you just need to look at some real-life examples. There is a young lady called Ashley in Newcastle who is 11 years old. She cares for three members of her immediate family. Her father has a mental health illness, her mother has a number of physical health issues and her sibling is autistic. To compound matters, one would imagine that it would be helpful that her mother, who has physical health issues, was in a previous life, when she was better, a teaching assistant. As she was a teaching assistant, she knew exactly how to respond when the local education authority sent a questionnaire asking about what was going on in home-schooling. The mother was able to fill in the form to make it appear that everything that should have been happening was happening, when in fact it was not. The reason for the mother, in a sense, not writing the truth was that she felt that, in the situation that she and the family were in, there was a greater need for the family to have the more concentrated time of the 11 year-old caring child looking after them than it was to pay attention to her need for home-education. That is the situation that one can find oneself in.