When Educational Systems Fail Our Children: A Mother's Journey Through Loss and Understanding

Our education system operates on an assumption: that children should adapt to fit its structures. But what happens to those whose neurobiology, trauma history, or simply whose authentic selves don't conform? They face an impossible choice—change who they are at devastating personal cost, or accept exclusion and judgement.

This is not an abstract policy debate for me. In 2004, my son Sam took his own life. His story—and mine—reveals how educational institutions can fail children in ways that echo throughout their lives, sometimes with tragic consequences.

The Weight of Forgiveness

For over twenty years, I couldn't write the full story of what happened to Sam. My heart wasn't peaceful enough to hold both my grief and the painful truth of how the system—and I—failed him. I wrestled with forgiveness. How could I forgive myself? How could I forgive the teachers, the other professionals, the rigid structures that couldn't see him?

Then understanding arrived, slowly: there is nothing to forgive. We were all doing what we thought was right with the only tools we had. Yet Sam was still harmed.

The Illusion of Control

When my children were small, I believed I could shape them into thriving adults. I thought the right school choices, the right interventions, the right guidance would ensure their success. I was wrong about what mattered.

Much was beyond my reach. Much was beyond my understanding.

Now I see that shaping and teaching weren't the point. The point was meeting my children exactly where they were—valuing them as perfectly formed individuals—and asking one essential question: "What do you need in order to thrive?"

Missed Opportunities

Sam's life reveals how many opportunities were missed to ask him that question. By me. By teachers. By other professionals. By the education system itself. So many chances to show him there was nothing wrong with him. So many moments when we could have built systems around his needs instead of expecting him to contort himself to fit ours.

His story illuminates how our educational institutions fail neurodivergent children, and how that failure ripples outward with consequences none of us can fully predict.

What Compassion Really Means

True compassion is both gentle and fierce. Gentle and responsive in meeting children where they are. Fierce in the courageous creation of new systems where diverse children can grow into their authentic selves and bring their unique gifts into the world.

This kind of compassion is what has the power to transform trauma and support children's natural unfolding.

An Invitation to Examine Your Role

I'm not asking anyone to carry guilt about Sam or children like him. I'm asking you all to recognise your own piece of this larger story—or similar stories playing out right now. To examine your role thoughtfully. Then to choose differently as you move through your life, your work, your everyday decisions. Especially when those choices ripple into other people's lives.

Listen Inward

Rather than looking outside for answers about what children need, try this: pause. Set aside your past pain and future fears. Listen inward. From that quiet place, you will begin to see clearly what is kind, what is compassionate, what your child—or the children in your care—need to thrive.

You'll also see how our systems need to respond so that all children can receive what they need.

A System That Failed Me First

Throughout my life, I've navigated educational systems that weren't designed for minds like mine or my son's. I've experienced moments when I felt compelled to do what I sensed was right, regardless of the cost, and other moments when I succumbed to pressure to conform. Both shaped my journey.

The system failed me long before it failed Sam. That's part of this story too.

Transformation Begins With Understanding

This is not just Sam's story or mine. It's about transforming how we understand education, belonging, and the true meaning of meeting every child's needs. It's about the profound shame of not belonging. It's about the damage inflicted when institutions fail to see children as they are.

And it begins with each of us pausing to ask: What do the children in my life need to thrive? Am I creating space for them to be who they are, or am I asking them to become something else?

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This post is adapted from my forthcoming memoir about Sam's life, my journey as his mother, and the educational systems that failed us both.

These Hands of Mine

A circle of remembering hands and holding hands

This hand of mine remembers holding my Granny's hand as she lay in her hospital bed in the old workhouse building and how she stroked mine and admired its brown, smooth skin. She might have been remembering her own hand, half a century earlier or even her mother’s and grandmother’s hands. A circle of remembering hands and holding hands.

These hands held my tiny children

These hands are the same hands that stroked my tiny boy's soft head and held his body close to mine. He weighed a little under eight pounds and my hands learned to protect him and support him as he leaned into my body sated with warm milk. Then, later, this hand protected my even tinier daughter to my body to share my warmth with her. And then, so blessed was I, these hands held a brother to them both.

Three little people and so beautiful, each of them in so many ways. The extraordinary way that they were completely themselves from the very start. Born, not created, but also so affected by all that happened around them. I weep to think that these hands did not always do enough to protect them.

These hands lifted them into the bath and out and wrapped them in towels and tucked them into their little cots and beds. These hands can change a baby’s nappy and popper them into their baby clothes instinctually, I was surprised to watch them do this so competently for my grandchildren.

These hands led them through the school gates

These hands pushed my children’s sturdy little backs as they shouted with laughter on the swings in the park. Comforted them when they cried. Folded piles and piles of clothes and picked up all the bricks and the books and the matchbox cars. Led them through the school gates and then let them go. They knew they didn’t want to go there. But I led them anyway. Everything said this was OK even though a big part of me knew it really was not. I shrivel inside to remember letting go of my youngest in tears and walking away from him, not really believing the reassurances of his teacher but following the expectations of society that says they must learn to leave their mothers when they are five.

This hand knew the warmth of his hand

This hand of mine knew the warmth of a teenage boy’s hand as we walked together through our village and I knew in those moments what a gift it was that he would hold his mother’s hand this way. Just walking together on our way home from a friend’s house under the stars.

These hands have done the most difficult tasks

This hand of mine held the phone to my ear as I heard his voice that night, only an hour or so before he died. This hand opened the door to the police and then both hands held my head in disbelief.

These hands, nineteen years after holding the first newborn boy, helped to carry the burgundy box of ashes home. They too weighed a little under eight pounds and carried incalculable sadness.

These hands helped to carry my father’s British racing green coffin and then sifted and sorted all the things from his lifetime.

And now these hands have more work to do

And now these hands have more work to do while they still can. These hands have learned to do so much. They have work to do in telling Sam’s story which is still so relevant. The thoughts come straight through to my fingers I find and I can watch the words appearing on the screen. The desperate need for kindness and compassion rather than judgement and exclusion for our children as they grow and learn. The ways that we are all involved in their growing and learning and how the most important thing that they need to know is that they are precious and loved and each a unique and valuable part of this world.

Holding shame with a compassionate heart

I see that I have not written for this blog for a very long time now. Despite there being a lot of life that has happened in those two years that brings up shame. Shame makes me want to hide away in case anyone sees how bad I am for this neglect of my own intentions.

Prickly and sticky shame

Shame is a prickly and hot feeling in my face and it’s the holding of my breath and a strong desire to disappear. It is sticky and really uncomfortable, and the strong temptation is to attempt to avoid it and not to admit to it.

It’s about survival and other people’s rules

In evolutionary terms shame serves an important survival purpose. If we are perceived as unacceptable to our community we run the risk of being excluded which, in some other times and places, would be life threatening. So the feeling of shame operates as an internal guide to when we are acting against the accepted norms of our community. The thing is that those norms are just other people’s rules that feel like they are concretely ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and have the power to make us ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They often don’t even really matter but just feel as if they do.

Therapists don’t have to be ‘sorted’

As a therapist, the story I can tell myself is that I am supposed to be ‘sorted’, to have my life organised and perfectly balanced in terms of my physical and mental and spiritual wellbeing and my relationships. And further to that, it can feel as if I can’t let anyone see when it really isn’t. But that wouldn’t be real – I know this!

So even with comparatively small things we can feel as if we are completely bad and unacceptable but what’s actually happening is that we feel bad and are still inherently good, so we can feel the feelings and relate to them with compassion.

The mistakes I made as a mother deserve my compassion

And then I thought about the visceral shame I have sometimes felt when thinking back to the mistakes I made as a mother in the past. The times when I put myself and what I wanted ahead of my children, or failed them in some way. When a child dies, of course, this self-examination is relentless and frankly cruel. We can all find moments like this when we remember and some of them feel like enormous, devastating mistakes or moments of neglect. And all of these, whatever the size they seem to be, deserve our deep compassion. When they come into our consciousness and trigger shame we need to allow the shame feelings and sensations to call our attention, and then to stay with them with all the compassion we can muster until they dissolve.

Allowing your heart to open with compassion

What is really happening is this:  I am feeling bad right now and I can hold this with compassion.  I do this by remembering to breathe, paying attention to the places in my body where I experience this feeling and simply allowing the sensations to be what they are then allowing my heart to open to myself with compassion.

Tara Brach tells a story of a woman who was completely overwhelmed with shame after her daughter told her what had happened to her as a child while her mother was caught up in drinking. A monk held the mother’s hand and drew a circle on her palm telling her that is the shame. The he held her hand gently in his warm hand, enclosing it with love and compassion. He told her that the holding is what you must do from your compassionate heart for yourself whenever you feel the shame in your body.

Hold your shame close like a mother holding her precious child and ask:
'My love, do you need to be healed today?'
And listen, listen carefully, listen from the depths of your soul now; listen to his or her timeless response as it emerges out of the thundering silence of meditation:
'Not healed, today, mother; only held.”' Jeff Foster 

Spiritual Practice as a Support for Profound Loss

In this blog post I want to explore the concept of a personal ‘spiritual practice’ as a support for the grieving process. I will attempt to describe what this means to me and what activities I think of as being helpful spiritual practices for me as I grieve the loss of my eldest child.

What do I mean by ‘spiritual’?

So what do I mean by ‘spiritual’? I have a strong sense of the presence of something that lies outside and beyond the material world of things and the everyday activities of being human as a member of society and the various communities I feel I belong to. This ‘something’ that I think of as the ‘spiritual’ is intangible and mysterious and I don’t exactly experience it directly but things happen that sort of indicate or ‘point to’ its existence. I can feel awestruck or suddenly connected to the ‘something’ that seems to unite everything at the same time as feeling deeply personal and familiar. I know that many would call this ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ or another name.

For me, spiritual does not imply religious, but does include the concepts of love, acceptance and connection that perhaps all religions have in their origins behind the superimposed dogma and required beliefs. Certainly, when called upon to state my ‘religion’ I choose ‘spiritual but not religious.’ as the closest definition of my position.

Rainbows and other everyday spiritual experiences

When my son died rainbows appeared. This was so unexpected and yet immediately meaningful. Witnessing a rainbow, for me, is now a spiritual experience and that means that witnessing that beautiful ephemeral spectrum of coloured light takes me closer to what lies beyond the ordinary. This also seems to me to take me closer to the essence of shared consciousness that unites us all, whether we are still living out a human existence or not, and thus closer to my son. I think of this realm as sort of all-encompassing ‘love’.

Other experiences that can take me closer to ‘what is’ are sunsets and moon risings and flocks of geese and bumblebees alighting on lavender blossoms. Babies smiling and gurgling. Looking up into the sky through a tangle of lofty tree branches. Listening to waves crashing onto the shore. Certain forms of music, especially piano music from Muse to Beethoven.

What do I mean by a spiritual practice?

So a ‘spiritual practice’ then means an action or activity or a set or series of actions or activities that I engage with, perhaps regularly, perhaps sporadically or occasionally, that aim to encourage feeling connected with this ‘all that is’. This could be a lot of different things and might be something that others also practice or something individual and personal.

So having defined the words I guess I have made this sound much more complicated than it needs to be. For my family and friends, sharing the moments when we see rainbows is a form of spiritual practice for us that supports us in our grief.

Here are two of the other spiritual practices I have found helpful in taking me closer to a connection with ‘what is’ beyond the everyday and ordinary as I live with profound loss.

The Tara Chant

During my psychotherapy training I was introduced to the concept of a bodhisattva as an enlightened being who is committed to resolving all the suffering in the world. Green Tara is a bodhisattva and she is usually depicted as sitting in a meditative pose with one leg extended so that she is always ready to step forward in compassionate action to resolve any suffering that she becomes aware of.

There is a recording here of Deva Premal singing the Tara Chant.

“Tara is the mother of all the Buddhas. When you practice Tara you come closer to her, and can feel her motherly love; you feel you are well-loved and nurtured by the most beautiful mother of all Buddhas.
”

— Tara in the Palm of your Hand, Venerable Zasep Rinpoche.

For me, to chant the Green Tara chant brings a sense of support and compassion towards my own suffering and others’ suffering. I like to do this by listening to this recording and singing along. This brings me a sense of not being alone but being connected with all that is beyond the everyday world and importantly not feeling powerless in the face of suffering because Tara is always there ready to accompany me.

Christmas food preparation as a spiritual practice

I used to love the October half-term holiday when I was a teacher. I would use some of the time to make mincemeat, Christmas cake and puddings and sloe gin all ready for Christmas. When Sam died this became something too painful to even think about doing as it brought with it memories of my children’s childhood years and family times. After a number of years I made the conscious decision to do this anyway and to allow the feelings of loss and sadness to be there alongside the other memories whilst measuring, chopping and slicing and filling the Kilner jars. In a sense this activity that my mother did with me as a child and her mother before her brings me into a feeling of connection with the archetypal love of all mothers and the inevitable love and pain that parenting entails. Thus I understand this to be a form of spiritual practice for me too as something that takes me closer to the realms of whatever it might be that connects and includes us all.

These spiritual practices help me not to feel alone in my loss

In my experience there are many different things that could be helpful grief-related spiritual practices for me. I realise that it could be argued that grieving in any form is a spiritual practice but I suspect this is not true when we feel alone in our grief. Maybe the most helpful practices are those that support us not to grieve in isolation but in connection with other beings and with what lies beyond the ordinary and everyday. Some of the hardest times to live with profound loss are the times when we feel that we carry this alone. For me, my personal forms of spiritual practice, help me to know that this is not true.