 I think that the main problem for adopted children, or in fact for any children who have had very early trauma, because that's really why most children come into adoption. So I think that the thing to understand really is that they view the world, and they may view the world in a different way. The key to it really is to understand that I like to see the world as an unsafe place. And if people don't feel safe, they find it very hard to learn. I get a lot bullied at school. I don't know why, but she backed me in the back and started kicking me as well. I told the teacher but she said, just move seats. I didn't really understand that. I just felt like really, really sad, because no one understands how I feel when I get really sad. Children who have had early trauma and neglect are going to be seeing the world as something that's intrinsically not safe. And so everything that happens to them is likely to, whether it's in school or in the family, is likely to be seen through that unsafe lens, if you like. Things come up all the time that sort of unsettle them as part of the school curriculum. My youngest one, for example, is going through, she's in biology, doing DNA at the moment. She gave her a moment and said that she felt very upset because they were all saying, oh, see, my dad's got blue eyes and my mum's got brown eyes and that's why I've got the colour eyes or my dad's got this and my mum's got that, that's why I owe her. And she said she felt very alone. Cos my son has a number of issues regarding his difficult early start in life. He found school quite a scary place to be and the way my son displays that anxiety is by maybe behaving in a way that teachers would find quite challenging, so he might get angry, he might get upset. So although he loved light school, cos he's a very sociable little boy, he wanted to be at school and he loved school, he found it quite stressful and felt quite scared a lot of the time he was there when he first started. The important things that parents can do is to communicate well with the school, to let the school know that their child is adopted, to help the school understand what that might mean for them, so what are the likely triggers, what's likely to make them feel scared or upset. To tell the school if the child's having some kind of therapy outside of school, then it's probably quite useful to tell the staff that, or at least some of the staff, so that everybody is talking to the child about their emotions in a similar way and everyone's understanding everything that's going on for that child. Well I'd already spoken to the school before he started about some of his attachment issues and they were very open to me talking about what he might need going into the school and as his behaviour, his issues started displaying themselves through his behaviour, then we had very frequent contact about what was going on for him, what they were doing to try and support him. When he's in his first year in reception, he had a homeschool book, so anything that happened in the day, the teacher would write in the book so that I could look at it when he came home and we could talk about it or I could suggest to the school things that might have triggered it. Education has to be very aware of where the child is at, whether they need a period of calm to start their day, whether they need some interventions, some sensory interventions, whether they need some help to structure themselves for learning or they might just need some individual support to touch base with and we just can some key people that make their day a little easier for them. I think it's a long journey that's only just begun if you want me to be very honest in terms of attachment and understanding of attachment and I think you will find that there may be a lot of people out there that look at some of the behaviours associated with attachment and they see them in a very different way and maybe look at how we can discuss things like that that is in an open forum but not so that it destroys the privacy of that child. I think it's almost like you could all these little boats in harbour about to set off on their journey of life and for some adopted children they don't know where they've come from so they don't know where they're going to and for some children that's very, very destabilising. The biggest thing that schools can do is just try and understand and be aware of that the adopted children may bring different things with them which you might not expect in a child of the same chronological age. Not every teacher can understand what these children bring and they need support to understand what that means.