Uncertainty about EHCPs is causing chaos and pain for families of children and young people with SEND.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic. I’m midway through my career and in my 40s so it seems a natural time to reflect on my life so far. I can look back at the decisions I made and the paths I’ve taken and how I have grown and developed in life as a human being and within my profession. It’s no surprise that professional identity becomes part of this reflection as it relates to my work and achievements. And it also influences my personal identity too.
Think about how often we meet new people and engage in the conversation about what we do as a job. It’s a key element of social interaction in Western cultures. We define ourselves by so many factors including religion, ethnicity, family status, occupation, socioeconomic background and sadly still sometimes the “financial class system”. I certainly know that I am proud to tell people I am an educated professional whilst also saying I am passionate about helping others through my work and life. I want to be known as someone who cares and values others and advocates for others.
How does this work with my professional identity in a profession which in the grand scheme of things is fairly new and has had a lot of fluctuations even in my time as a speech and language therapist? It started from a place of helping others, but also the profession was very much based on a medical model. I am pleased that this had somewhat shifted over the years but also this has raised many questions about how I conduct myself and where I sit within my career.
I am pleased to say that since the neurodiversity movement began and has taken off, my eyes have been opened to the downsides of the “deficit model” in which was originally trained. I was missing the individual’s strengths. I began to lean into connection with children in a way that encouraged me to use their strengths in an engaging way and this linked into the neurodiversity movement.
So who am I now? Well I’m not the therapist I had imagined myself to be. I’m continually becoming the therapist I was meant to be. This is closely linked to my worldview of becoming the human I was meant to be. The older I get, the more complex that idea feels and so it does with my professional identity. I don’t think I’ll reach a point where I know all the things I’d like to know because as I grow I find out how many more things there are to know than I thought I knew. I’m getting comfortable with learning more resulting in a feeling that I have even more to learn. And I love that!!
