Millie was seven years old when she started struggling with going to school. Her teachers weren’t too worried initially, her mother, Sarah, says: she was managing fine academically. But Millie, who is autistic and has a sensory processing disorder, seemed to find the busy classroom overwhelming. The following year, she began seriously to resist.
“It would start the night before,” says Sarah, a children’s nurse. “She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat her dinner, then in the morning she’d be absolutely flat out – it was taking an hour to get her out of bed. I would have to dress her, she’d be like a rag doll. And all the time they kept saying, ‘Just get her in, she’s fine once she’s in.’ It got to the point where I was physically unable to carry her, she’d be lying on the floor kicking and screaming.”
