Primal Parenting

We sat in the school room that looked nothing like a school room, and the pain and desperation of the parents in the air was a living, breathing, wounded animal. It was palpable. Our children had suffered, and there had been nothing we could do to stop them suffering. Then, we had been given something good, that worked for them in the way that no other education or social enterprise had, and now they were taking it away from us.

This could be the opening paragraph of a dramatic fiction, but it isn't, it is the opening paragraph of a description of a real life event. Our real lives. We are the painfully real result of a social policy that has arisen because of a dozen or so egos, a few decisions that have gained momentum, and a refusal to go back.

We were well brought-up parents. We listened as politely as we were physically able to, as they rained their philosophy and politics on us like blows. We challenged, reigning our anger and fear and desperation in as far as we could, but it slipped through in every word. We all understood that the people sitting in front of us absorbing our response were only part of a whole. They weren't going to stop the wheel of policy change rumbling over us any more than we were. We just wanted to understand their justification for it.

The truth is, there was no justification. There are no reasons. They can close a centre of excellence that has been of unmeasurable benefit to our children for no better reason than that they don't have it in Fenland; they need to get out of the building; 'we' think children are always better off in school.

Do they really, truly believe that children are always better off in school? Surely that is not a belief that an intelligent, thinking, functioning human being can actually hold?

Schools are brutal. Even the very best – and by what measure we define the very best requires a long debate of its own – brutalise children in some way, in order to have them conform. That's okay. For most children, a brutal training ground for the adult world is more beneficial than not. We might not like it, but we understand it, and so we allow it. Parents are protective of their young, but they are pragmatic, too.

Some children, though, through no fault except of fate and nature, are made to suffer inordinately. It might be through physical illness, like us; mental illness – no less painful; or circumstance. Life can hurt, and it can hurt our young before they are ready to take the pain. The idea of taking children who have suffered beyond others, and forcing them into the storm of a huge, statutory institution - an institution with not only the potential of making them suffer more, but the experience of having already made them suffer more - to their parents, at least, is anathema.

And to have had something good – something soothing and stretching and challenging and gentle, an imperfect gift, but a gift nonetheless – to have that withdrawn, for no good reason – that hurts.

There are good parents and bad parents. Mostly, there are parents who do right and wrong by their children every day. We respond to the circumstances of our bewildering lives as best as we can, and sometimes we get it right. In that painful, anguished meeting, we did do something right.

It is important that our children see us fight for them, even if we don't win. They need the lesson that the smallest of us can effect change; and it is more important to show our love by standing up to the juggernaut of social policy than to actually achieve our ends. If the only change we manage to make is an understanding of why something is wrong, we have done something good.

Even though our children will remain subjected to anxiety beyond their reasonable capacity, shifts in understanding will make a difference. Tiny changes in attitude and motivation, even at this stage, will affect the actions of policy makers and policy activators. Determination to control our lives, though control is an illusion, will motivate us to take our own steps to put alternative measures in place.

As parents, we are in a better place to protect our young than we were before we went in to that room; even though it doesn't feel that way at all.

Following on from this meeting, we met with the Head and management of the local school that is going to take responsibility for educating our daughter back. The Head, with no conscious instinct for survival, felt compelled – driven, almost – to make us listen to his political and philosophical reasons for wanting to provide an education for our daughter.

I have never in my life come so close to physically attacking a relative stranger.

Social policy can, and frequently does, come between good parents and their children. It is the world we have to live in. There are too many of us for it to be any different.

Those who wield social power would do well, though, to remember that the bond between parent and child is primal. You have read my words, you can acknowledge the breadth and depth of my understanding; you know I am no fool.

But if you want to hurt my child - even though you think your reasons for doing so are justified by beautifully constructed and morally sound philosophical and political motivations - you have to get through me first.

And I know that you, for all your standing in society, would do the same for yours.