A Letter to Davina: On Opening the Box

On dignity, deficit, and the stories we write about children.

This piece is a response to Davina's Place’s recent essay on SEND assessment reports. I recommend reading hers first before continuing.

Who are those SEND assessment reports really for?

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Dear Davina,

Reading your piece, Who are those SEND assessment reports really for?, hurt in my heart.

That’s always where this issue has lived for me — with the individual child. As I read about Sam returning to the blanket box and opening his own file, I felt my stomach drop, my body go cold, and then something in me break open again. It confirmed a fear I have carried quietly for years: that the words we write about children can become the words they carry inside themselves.

There is a particular kind of harm that persists because it is framed as help. It is quiet, procedural, and spoken in professional language. And because it wears the clothes of care, it often goes unnamed.

Much of your story felt painfully familiar to me — not shocking so much as recognisable. The reports. The assessments. The promise that if you gather enough professional opinions, enough evidence, enough documentation, the right support will finally appear.

What parents are rarely told is that these documents often function less as living guides and more as keys — keys that sometimes unlock a placement that is less harmful, but which are then difficult to translate into daily reality. They are long, technical, and often unwieldy. Teachers and support staff are under immense pressure, managing large caseloads and complex classrooms, and while they are expected to work closely within the framework of these plans, the time and capacity to absorb and consistently implement every detail is not always there. As a result, provision can become loosely interpreted, unevenly applied, or gradually reduced to broad generalities rather than the precise support originally intended.

And yet these documents follow children. They accumulate. They endure.

What struck me most forcefully in your piece was not only what was written about Sam, but who those words were written for. As you say, they were never written with him as a reader in mind. They were written with the intention of helping him, yes — but they were written for panels, for thresholds, for funding decisions — for a system that requires deficit as its currency, as you so powerfully name.

Children, however, do not know this.

When a child encounters a file full of professional opinion about themselves, they do not read it as context. They read it as truth.

Even adults struggle to hold the distinction between “this was written about me” and “this is who I am.” For a child or young person who is still developing, still forming their identity — especially one who has spent years being assessed, questioned, and scrutinised — that separation may not exist at all.

The image of Sam armouring himself in the waiting room has stayed with me. Children experience these processes far more viscerally than we acknowledge. Questions can feel like spotlights. Assessments can feel like tests they don’t understand how to pass. Even when done kindly, they require children to stretch themselves to the edge of their capacities, again and again — often in a new place and with a new person. They are still developing the perspective and language needed to make sense of what is happening to them.

No wonder some refuse. No wonder some protect themselves.

You write that this wasn’t personal — that the headteacher believed what she wrote and needed to ensure the school was not blamed. I agree that much of this harm is structural rather than malicious. Most professionals care deeply. Most parents are acting from fierce love.

But I also believe there are lines that should not be crossed, even within broken systems.

Empathy should be non-negotiable in any process involving children. Before we write about a child, we should imagine ourselves reading those words about our own younger selves. We know how it lands when something negative is written or spoken about us as adults. How much more deeply might it land for someone still forming a sense of who they are?

Language matters. Words like manipulative, aggressive, a threat are not neutral when applied to young children. They imply intent and character flaw rather than distress, nervous system overload, or developmental difference. There are ways to describe harm factually without attaching negative moral traits to someone who is, by definition, still forming and highly vulnerable.

The same is true of parental blame. Outside of the most extreme circumstances, professionals rarely have enough knowledge of a family’s inner life to justify sweeping judgements about parenting. Writing such claims into formal records can do real damage — and it is not required by any threshold I have ever worked within.

If humanity and compassion were treated as core principles — not optional extras — much of the language would change.

You ask: who were those reports really for?

From my perspective, they were for the system. For panels. For funding thresholds. For a structure that demands evidence of deficit before it will release support.

You ask: who should have been thinking about the child as a potential reader of their own story?

All of us. Especially those of us with power — professionals, assessors, report writers and compilers, decision-makers. If dignity had been treated as non-negotiable, the language would have been different.

And you ask what needs to change.

For me, it begins here: we have to stop treating deficit as the price of care — because true care should never require diminishment. We have to design processes that document need without destroying identity. We have to write with the child in mind — not just the panel. Compassion cannot be something we assume sits quietly in the background; it has to shape the words themselves.

And perhaps, in a deeper sense, we have to ask why so many children require formal documentation in order to be accommodated at all. In a truly inclusive system — one built around human variation rather than compliance with narrow norms — far fewer children would need to have their complexity compressed into paperwork in order to belong.

Most of all, we have to be willing to speak about this openly.

What stays with me from your piece is not only the injustice of what happened, but the loneliness of it. Most parents enter the system in good faith. They cannot know, at that stage, what only experience teaches later. They are asked to place blind faith in processes that promise help and rarely speak of cost. They are compelled to describe their children through deficit, even as every instinct in them wants to protect, celebrate, and defend.

If any parent reading this has gathered reports in desperate hope, I want them to know: the discomfort you felt was not weakness. It was wisdom.

If any professional reading this has written such reports, I want them to pause — and imagine the child, years later, opening the file.

That pause — that moment of empathy — is where change begins.

Thank you, Davina, for opening the box — not just the physical one in your home, but the one so many families are quietly carrying.

With respect and solidarity,
Gem