Appeal! Appeal! Appeal!

Thankfully our local authority have come back sooner than expected with an answer to Sofia’s school placement.  — sadly it was a ‘no’.

This sets out our agenda for the next eight months as being completely focused on appealing this decision.   It will be no mean feat as I have been told that local authorities fight mean and dirty.   The upside is that their evidence lacks depth so it looks like the counter to that is to overwhelm the tribunal with assessment reports of Sofia that give a much clearer picture of what she really needs and argue that the placement is necessary to meet those needs.

As this will be the focus of our existence I’m not sure whether we will be able to get to India as planned.  In terms of time we may have a window before the tribunal date but even then funds will be significantly depleted by the appeals process (assessments will be privately funded and a solicitor will need to be on the case) that we may not be able to go anyway.

We will remain hopeful none the less – so watch this space for last-minute announcements!

For our new followers, the back story to this is that I made the application for this placement just before we left for Africa – somewhat naively, I thought I would be able to appeal a ‘no’ decision on the road – not only was I not in the mind frame to deal with the appeal so ended up cancelling it, but now I’m working on it I realise that actually it would have been a mammoth effort of super human proportions to achieve any success whilst travelling (especially with all the problems we were having with the bike!).   So when we returned to the UK Sofia took up the placement that was offered.    One year and one term later we are now revisiting the placement – only this time I am determined to make sure that she gets it.  Please keep your fingers crossed for us!

Happy New Year! We hope it is a good one for everyone!