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ADHD Parent Support Group

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General

1 October 2019 By Claire SPACE Team

ADHD Awareness Month

October is ADHD Awareness Month, so the SPACE Team are being more vocal than usual about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

For us every month is ADHD Awareness Month
For us every month is ADHD Awareness Month

ADHD is a life long condition and for us every single month of the year is ADHD Awareness Month, so why do we have a specific focus in October? Why does ADHD need an awareness month? Simply put we need an awareness month because the lives of those with ADHD are still being ruined by ignorance.

Ignorance, stigma and misinformation is still routinely ruining the lives of children, young people and adults with ADHD, which simply isn’t good enough. The ADHD community needs everybody to understand what ADHD is and sometimes more importantly, what ADHD isn’t.

When there are still head teachers claiming that “they don’t believe in ADHD” we need to raise awareness. When GPs tell adults that “only children can have ADHD” we need to raise awareness. When children with ADHD are routinely excluded from school, we need to raise awareness. When those with ADHD are significantly over represented in the prison population, we need to raise awareness. When well meaning friends and relatives suggest that frazzled parents should “give their kids a good hiding” we need to raise awareness. Whilst lives are still being ruined, we need to raise awareness.

We need to dispel the myths, at least the most common ones.

  1. Myth 1 ADHD doesn’t exist
  2. Myth 2 ADHD only affects children
  3. Myth 3 ADHD only affects boys
  4. Myth 4 ADHD Adults are incapable of being successful in any area of their lives
  5. Myth 5 Everybody with ADHD is hyperactive
  6. Myth 6 ADHD was made up my pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs
  7. Myth 7 Medication drugs children up so that they stop running around being naughty
  8. Myth 8 ADHD is a new thing
  9. Myth 9 ADHD is over diagnosed in the UK
  10. Myth 10 Those with ADHD are less intelligent than those without it
  11. Myth 11 Those with ADHD can’t concentrate on anything ever
  12. Myth 12+ ADHD is caused by insert popular nonsense theory here

ADHD is a neurobiological condition and is not caused by poor parenting, eating too many sweets or allowing children too much screen time. Common sense dictates that being a bad parent and allowing a child to spend countless hours watching uncensored YouTube Videos on a diet of nothing but sweets and full fat cola is unlikely to lead to a consistently well behaved child, but it doesn’t cause ADHD. A healthy diet, regular exercise and consistent boundaries within a loving family relationship will almost certainly improve the behaviour of a child with ADHD, but it won’t “cure” the condition.

Those with ADHD have brains which work slightly differently to those without ADHD. They’re not better or worse, but they are definitely different and problems occur when those with the condition are expected to use their brains in a way that doesn’t suit them without the necessary support to do so.

If a six year old genuinely struggles to sit still and you make them sit quietly on a carpet for thirty minutes, there is likely to be a problem. A problem that some teachers attempt to address by removing playtime for the “naughty child that wouldn’t sit still” Not because teachers are evil beings that seek to punish small children for their bodily functions, but because some of them still don’t understand that the child in question couldn’t sit still, not that they wouldn’t.

If every teacher in every school understood that the negative behaviours they see are the result of unmet needs, then that would change how the vast majority of them handle them. If every teacher and every parent understood that having difficulty with organisation was a common ADHD trait and not the result of being lazy and not caring, then most of them would approach the issues of children losing things and being late differently. Adults would look for strategies to help children be organised, instead of telling them off for being disorganised.

If people were aware that not everybody with ADHD bounces up and down with obvious outwards signs of hyperactivity, then less inattentive people with ADHD would be left unsupported, feeling that their struggles are their own fault and a product of their own incompetence. Less inattentive teenagers would feel that their inability to revise effectively for their exams is their own fault. Less people who fail to meet the naughty boy stereotype as a child, would go on to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety later in life.

The reason we need an awareness month for ADHD is to amplify these messages. There are organisations up and down the country sharing information about ADHD, raising awareness, destroying myths and fighting against stigma and we all make noise all year long, but when we all make noise at the same time, we’re a little bit louder and little bit harder to ignore. Unlike some large charities with a big marketing budget and a full team at their disposal, lots of the smaller groups are only heard occasionally by a small audience. When we all yell the same message, at the same time, our voices are more likely to be heard.

ADHD Awareness Month is the time when we all say the same thing at the same time. We get together to share knowledge and information. We network with our peers. We find out about the latest research. We raise our game and we bring that back to the families we work with.

We’re proud to support local families but we need to do more, so this ADHD Awareness Month we will also be fundraising through our Just Giving Account https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/adhd-awareness-month-2019

The SPACE Team are all volunteers and gladly give our time and professional expertise free of charge, but unfortunately some of things we do cost cold hard cash, as do a lot of the things we intend doing to support local families over the next 12 months. If you would like to support our work we would be extremely grateful for any donation however small.

Happy ADHD Awareness Month!

Filed Under: ADHD Awareness Month, Fundraising, General

28 May 2019 By Claire SPACE Team

Online Resources

Useful Resources

We have gathered a number of online resources, which we feel may be useful to the families we work with and the wider ADHD community. At present the list only contains a small number of links but this will grow over time. The reason for this is because we will be reviewing each individual resource before sharing on our website, a process which takes time.

We will only ever share things that we believe to be useful, which come from sources that we are confident are reputable. Whilst we are happy to accept suggestions of websites and other online materials, we have no intention of adding links purely because they have been suggested, however well intentioned the suggestion may be. We would also like to make it extremely clear that we are here to provide useful information to the ADHD community and not to help other organisations with their marketing activities. Apologies if that sounds a little harsh, but judging from the sheer amount of unsolicited emails we receive, it seemed worth mentioning.

Our website currently contains links to ADDISS, the national ADHD charity and The ADHD Foundation. These two organisations have worked tirelessly over the years to provide information and support to families, we know them personally and are proud to be associated with them. We have also added a link to the ADHD guidance on the NICE website.

We will be adding more resources over the coming weeks and months and hope that you find them useful.

SPACE Online Resources Page

Filed Under: ADHD, General

25 January 2019 By Claire SPACE Team

SEND Improvement Programme

SEND Improvement programme

As a result of Stockport’s disappointing SEND review there is a lot of activity to improve things for the future.

We are on the mailing list which keeps us up to date on the various activities and we’re doing our best to share this information with the families we know. As we only send emails that we write ourselves we decided to share the newsletter here on our website. Feel free to share the details with anybody you think may find the information useful.

Further details and ways to respond to the Board managing the SEND Review Programme is available on the Local Offer Website.

Headlines from the SEND Improvement Board    January 2019


Why a Virtual Network bulletin?
Since SAVY closed down, there’s been no forum to share information across young people’s voluntary groups in Stockport, including those with an interest in special educational needs and disability (SEND).  Last September Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspected services and support for children and young people with SEND in Stockport and found some significant weaknesses.  As a result, Stockport Council and the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) have set up an Improvement Board and programme to deal with the weaknesses and improve services and support for children and young people with SEND and their families.  You can read the report here.
Stockport has held a number of meetings for parents and carers to hear their experiences and to find out how families want things to get better.  It’s committed to publish summaries of these meetings and we hope this will happen soon.  You can already find other information about the inspection follow-up here, and we expect that’s where the summaries will be published.  In the meantime this bulletin will be circulated from time to time to bring Stockport voluntary groups up to speed with what’s happening.  It is not an official publication as it’s written by the board parent/carer representative, not the council or the CCG.


What’s happened so far at the board?
The board consists of senior leaders across the council and CCG with responsibility for services that affect children and young people with SEND and their families:
Noreen Dowd, Accountable Officer, NHS Stockport CCG (co-chair)
Chris McLoughlin, Director of Children’s Services, SMBC (co-chair)
Alan Beswick, Interim Director of Education Services, SMBC 
Cathy Lyall, Strategic Lead for S.E.N. and Inclusion, SMBC 
Claire Woodford, Director of Women, Children and Diagnostics Business Group, NHS SFT 
Deborah Woodcock, Director of Operations, Stockport Family and Principal Social Worker, SMBC 
Donna Sager, Director of Public Health, SMBC 
Josie Kershaw, Associate Director for Mental Health and Specialist Services, Pennine Care 
Mark Fitton, Director of Adult Social Care, SMBC 
Maria McCaffery, interim SEND support, NHS Stockport CCG 
Paul Harper, Co-Chair, Parents in Partnership Stockport (PIPS)


In brief, so far the board:
Has set up four workstreams to work on improvements.  These are (in no particular order):
Co-production
Joint Commissioning
Monitoring and Evaluation
SEN Support and Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs)
Has decided to split the responsibilities of the last workstream into four sub-groups:  Tell it once culture;  Social Care input into EHC plans;  SEN support;  and The Wider EHC process;
Is ensuring parent/carer representation on all groups;
Has held five public meetings with parent/carers to find out about their experiences of services and support and how they’d like things to get better;
Is using some expert consultancy support to help with the work;
Has brought together detailed borough-wide data on the needs of those with SEND 0-25, called a Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA).  It will use this to help target improvements and to chart progress over the next few years;
Has produced a draft plan showing the Department for Education (DfE) how it will address the identified weaknesses.  This is called a Written Statement of Action (WSoA) and should be finalised in February.  Stockport will publish this plan.


Can I read about the board’s work in more detail?
The board will be publishing official minutes on the Local Offer website.  It has now agreed to make these parent-friendly. So all the minutes from January 2019 onwards will be easier to follow than the first few, which had a lot of abbreviations and some business-speak.


What will happen in the next few weeks?
The WSoA will be the overall plan of action.  It will show how the local area will tackle the key weaknesses which the inspection identified.  The board and its workstreams will carry out this work.  Some of it will be short-term and done quickly and other parts are expected to take at least a year.  Stockport has promised a wider SEND strategy, which we expect it will begin producing once the DfE has approved the WSoA.


I want to get more involved – how can I do this?
If you’re a parent/carer of someone 25 or under with SEND, you can offer to be a representative on a workstream.  These meet during the day, roughly every two weeks or monthly.  Email cathy.lyall@stockport.gov.uk to say you’re interested.  
We’re collecting case studies of families with experience of SEND services and support in Stockport, which will be made anonymous, analysed and shown to officials and families to help show the lived experience of families.  If you’d like to share your story, please email info@pipstockport.org as soon as possible and head your message SEND case study.

Paul Harper Co-Chair PIPS

Filed Under: General

16 January 2019 By Claire SPACE Team

Stockport SEND Review

Stockport SEND Review

Following the recent review of services in Stockport for children with special educational needs and disabilities we have been taking part in the feedback process. For more information please check out the post we added to our blog earlier today which includes links to the full report, the current feedback survey and contacts for the SEND Review Team.

Filed Under: General

8 February 2018 By Claire SPACE Team

SPACE Stockport

SPACE Stockport is a support group for parents and carers of children and young people in the Stockport area with ADHD and associated conditions. We hold monthly meetings which are an opportunity to talk to other parents who face the same challenges in a relaxed and informal way.

Filed Under: General, SPACE Stockport Homepage Text

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