My wife Sharon knew before me. Mothers always do. Grace had reached most of her milestones before her twin brother Ollie but she didn't socialise with other toddlers and her speech was non-existent.
I was partly in denial. Putting them on my shoulders, I would ask each of them where they were, pretending I didn't know. Ollie would crane his neck down and around to let me know he was there.
Grace didn't. She was in her own world. A hearing test just before her second birthday in 2020 didn't show up any issues.
The following year, we applied for an Assessment of Need (AON) and in September 2021 secured a cancellation appointment with a preliminary assessment team. They would determine which direction Grace would go, whether she required multi-disciplinary or single-discipline support. It was one of the infamous 90-minute meetings that lasted less than an hour.
The report produced by that review team found that she needed to be assessed for autism and additionally required speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, and psychology interventions from her local Children's Disability Network Team (CDNT). Her service statement, which was to follow the report within a month, we had to seek through an upheld complaint and a subsequent appeal when that complaint initially went unheeded. We didn't receive it until May last year.
Almost four years on from her preliminary assessment that found Grace required the aforementioned interventions, she has received none of them from the C.