Physical access and participation

Most of what limits participation is the room, not the child.

Physical and medical care belongs with your consultant and therapy team. What is usually missing is anyone owning the ordinary questions — whether your child can get to the lesson, use the materials, be understood by a supply teacher, and take part in what happens between lessons.

We do not provide physiotherapy, orthotics or medical management, and we will not second-guess the team who do. We coordinate around them and we report what we see in school and at home.

Where this sits in the five stages

Understand Plan Build Transfer Step Back
What brings families to us

You may recognise some of this.

None of these is a diagnosis and none of them means something is wrong. They are the patterns that tend to be described on the first call.

  • Excellent medical care and no plan for the school day
  • Access arrangements that work in theory and fail on a wet Tuesday
  • Communication that is slower than the classroom's pace, so your child stops being asked
  • Support staff who help so quickly that independence never gets practised
  • Every professional holding one piece and nobody holding the join
What support looks like

Cerebral palsy, through the five stages.

The pathway is the same for every child. What changes is what each stage contains.

01

Understand

A functional needs assessment across home and school.

What that looks like hereWhere in the day participation actually drops — and how much of that is fatigue, access, communication pace or adult habit.
02

Plan

One page everyone works from.

What that looks like hereBuilt around your medical team's targets rather than alongside them, with their input recorded in the plan.
04

Transfer

Into the classroom.

What that looks like hereA supervised LSA trained on the specific difference between assisting and taking over, with fading written in from day one.
05

Step Back

Support reduces on purpose.

What that looks like hereAdult proximity fades before hours do — the first thing we want your child to lose is someone standing over them.

What we do

  • Map the school day for access, fatigue and participation, not only for safety
  • Set goals about doing things independently, including slowly
  • Train staff to wait, and to help less rather than faster
  • Coordinate the plan around the medical team's targets, in writing
  • Reduce adult proximity as a measured milestone

What we don't do

  • Provide or advise on physiotherapy, orthotics or medical care
  • Recommend an assistant whose role is undefined
  • Confuse being helped efficiently with taking part
  • Duplicate assessments your clinical team has already done

If any of these is what you are looking for, we are the wrong provider and we would rather say so now than three months in.

We do not diagnose our own clients. Formal diagnosis stays with independent clinicians we neither own nor pay. Our assessment is functional — what your child can do, what gets in the way, what a school can realistically deliver. It is a different question, and we are careful not to blur the two.

Questions

Straight answers.

Do you provide physiotherapy?

No. Physical and medical care stays with your consultant and therapy team, and we will not duplicate or contradict them. Our work is participation, learning and the school day, planned around what they are doing.

Our school says it cannot meet my child's access needs.

Sometimes that is true and sometimes it is a resourcing conversation nobody has framed properly. Our assessment describes what would actually be required in concrete terms, which is usually what a school needs in order to say yes or an honest no.

Will an assistant make my child more dependent?

It can, and it often does. That is exactly why the LSA role is written with fading built in, supervised by the clinician who set the goals, and reviewed on whether adult proximity is coming down.

Where this starts

Tell us what you've noticed.

Twenty minutes on the phone with someone who does this every day. No assessment, no cost, and no obligation to become a client at the end of it.

If we're not the right people, we'll tell you who is. That includes naming providers we don't own, and it costs you nothing either way.