Does anyone else sometimes feel that they need a holiday after the school holidays. Well, you're not alone, our summer holiday was jam packed with keeping the children busy, making sure they were happy and having fun, seeing friends when that was possible, catching up with family, and doing all the things that we've desperately missed over the last 12 months. However, for many families they will have been busy at home during the summer holidays keeping their children occupied alone without help and support from friends, family, or other community members and that is equally as exhausting. And it's not just keeping children occupied and helping them remain active ensuring that they are safe and well, it's also planning for the start of a new school year.

Planning a new school year can be complicated for both the parent carer and the child. For parent carers there is the administration that goes into planning for a new school term whether that be moving schools and re acquainting yourself with new policies, new processes, and new staff, or supporting your child in changing teachers changing classroom or having a new support with them for this school year. All of which brings a range of anxiety's for us as the parent carer, balancing the conversations that are needed to advise staff of new information that has come along such as the latest physio assessment, or an updated occupational therapy report, or even a whole new diagnosis. But then add to that the anxiety our children may be feeling as well, preparing themselves for any changes or simply having to readjust back into school life, and now summer holidays become extremely tiring. The start of a new school term is a real bag of mixed emotions for us as parent carer's, we're looking forward to getting back to our normal routines and to have time to catch up on the many things that you can't do when your child is at home with you, but there is also the anxiety and the worry that comes along with how you feel your young person is feeling and the concern you have about how they will manage those feelings when going back to school.

For some families the idea of school refusal starts to play on our minds, where if you’ve had a young person who struggles to stay in the school setting for a little while and has refused to attend, you grow concerned that they may revert to some of those behaviour patterns. For other families the concern might be more along the lines of will the right services be engaging with the school at the beginning of this new year to ensure that the right help and the right support is in place for my child. And for some families the return to school is an opportunity to start fresh, to think about how do we best support my child to access the education that they need and how do we help them be happy.

So, by the time you get to your young person starting back at school, you have the morning routines, the journey to school, the getting through the doors, all to navigate, and for some that will be a huge challenge. While for some the problem will be when their children return home and have the security to let go of all of the anxiety they've been holding in all day long and effectively go pop. this is when many families will feel they need a holiday after the holidays.

So what can we do to help with this? There's lots of stuff out there from organisations like Autism West Midland, the BeeU service, and mental health organisations all providing tips tricks and advice on how to support your young person to cope with the transition of returning to school. But that doesn't help us as parent carers manage how we feel about the situation, and what's important for us as parent carers is that we take time to process how we feel about this, to create space in our day to decompress from some of those concerns and to make time to address our worries. However, we also want to ensure that we've communicated everything we feel we need to share with school. Some of the things we often don't think are immediately important suddenly become important at the last minute, so things like receiving an occupational therapy report and then thinking ‘oh maybe school have had that, but have they implemented this, and have they read it the same way that I've read it, have they thought about it in this context or that context’. Sending an email sharing those thoughts can sometimes help to take that pressure off our minds and stimulate a conversation with the school about your thoughts giving them that prompt which can be helpful.

So, while many people find the summer holidays are an opportunity to sit back and relax, we as parent carers of children with special educational needs and disabilities know full well that a holiday is never holiday, it's just an opportunity to do more admin.

Taking all of that into consideration PACC would like to take the opportunity to thank parent carers for the invaluable work that you do that often goes unrecognised by so many. We don't hear thank you often enough as parent carers, if at all, and PACC would like to take this opportunity to say whilst you might feel like a week on a beach a week, a weekend in a secluded cabin in the mountains, or just a night at home with a bottle of something chilled and a good old film on the telly are exactly what you need right now you also need to hear thank you. For some families the end of holiday period is just the beginning of another challenging time, and we recognise that thank you might not feel like enough now but it's important that it's said.

This year PACC is focusing on the relationship between schools and their parent carer communities. We would welcome families to share with us how you're start to the school year has gone. Please tell us about the good, the bad, and the ugly as it all helps us to understand how we can help improve your lives through the work that we do with our strategic partners in Shropshire. please share your thoughts with us through our social media channels or via email to enquiries@paccshropshire.org.uk.