KAREN Faldon is tired, really tired. She tries to hide it but 21 years of keeping an ear out for her son, Adam, and the constant battle to get the help to which he is entitled have destroyed her ability to sleep.

Adam has dyspraxia, a seemingly nebulous collection of impairments and difficulties which add up to a situation that affects everything from his ability to lock the door (“I can’t always remember which way it goes”) boiling the kettle with nothing in it and even comprehending his own speech. “Sometimes even I couldn’t understand myself when I talked,” he says.

No wonder dyspraxia receives so much less attention than other more recognised impairments. Especially when some folk still refer to it as ‘Clumsy child syndrome’.

Karen gives a pick ‘n’ mix run-down of some of the issues Adam faced when he was younger.

“He had no sense of danger. One day he was hanging out of the window and he’d just run into the road if he saw something interesting the other side.” Well into his teens, Karen attended to his personal care (it’s a mark of his maturity and her love that he’ll let her speak about this) and it took years for him to learn to shower himself.

He would break things by accident and his concentration span was minimal.

All this can be put up with. Much harder is watching your child bang his head because he is so frustrated at school. Or being bullied on the bus for being different. Or having no friends.

Thanks to the superhuman efforts of his parents, Adam has plenty to say for himself these days; he is clear, witty, makes his point and is about to train as a bee-keeper. But his charm and optimism belie the obstacles he has faced.

“School wasn’t great,” he laughs. “The teachers didn’t really understand what dyspraxia was and I was quite hyper so that didn’t help. I would just get up from the table when I thought of something and they’d get cross.”

Karen used to help at his school breaktimes. “He was always on his own,” she remembers. “He’d walk over to a group and they’d all melt away.”

Crunch time came when the literacy hour was introduced. Like many dyspraxic people, Adam has dyslexia. “Everything was timed and I couldn’t finish,” he explains. “The teacher was more interested with the high achievers and two of my friends would help me but they were on different tables.”

He would hit his own head and shout: “I’m stupid, I’m stupid,” but rarely at school. Years later, Karen asked him why he never told his teachers. “I didn’t want to get into trouble,” he said.

Finally, Karen and Adam’s father, David, decided to try and get specialised professional help. And so began the horrendous, dispiriting battle that is the process of getting a Statement of Special Educational Needs.

Anyone who’s tried to obtain one knows the dismal marathon requires reports from teachers, therapists, psychologists, community paediatricians, and social services. This is expensive and local authorities can be reluctant to pay, because they know that once a child is statemented, they will be legally obliged to provide what he requires. Even if you do pay for these reports, like Karen, there is no fast-track.

Karen and Adam’s description of the statement process are enough to make anyone bang their head in frustration. Statement reports are only valid for a certain length of time. If something goes wrong, parents very often have to start from the beginning.

She wrote to then-party leaders, Tony Blair, Charles Kennedy and Michael Howard but in the infuriating world of dyspraxia, there are very few with whom the buck stops.

Karen gave up and removed Adam from mainstream education and placed him in a Steiner establishment. After a year he continued his education at home. This and the seven years of speech therapy inflicted such financial damage that the family had to downsize their home.

Karen estimates they have spent more than £30,000 but when Adam applied to go to college, the family were told that because they had “chosen” to remove him from the system, they should pay for the privilege.

Eventually he did attend Kingston Maurward, obtaining a Level I NVQ in horticulture and completing a Skills for Working Life course. He now attends the Holt Wood Community Farm run by Nigel Pritchard, who emerges as one of the few real heroes for Karen and Adam.

“He is brilliant, he helped set this up because he realised there wasn’t the right provision for young adults in situations like Adam’s,” says Karen.

She is doing what she can to raise understanding, setting up the East Dorset Dyspraxia Support Group and helping to co-ordinate a group for younger mums, which meets at Haskins near Ferndown, on the second Tuesday of each month.

“It’s a tiny bit of help but it’s already made a difference,” she says. “Some of the young people have managed to make friends, some for the first time.”

But when Karen hears stories like the young person so lonely she advertised for friends, she worries. “The worst thing,” she says, “is when you talk to parents of younger children and you realise how little has changed.”

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