Repair - Edinburgh

***calling all parents of children who are unable to attend school (EBSNA)***
Glasgow uni are currently undertaking research on this subject and need your input.
Please fill out the form below. As a thank you, you will be reimbursed for your time with a love2shop voucher.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfP-QnEbGl6nj2G9K7ovTWc2ve6LuROY0h3oofzoOXVArf-3g/viewform

The REPAIR Steering Group calls for urgent action on the McManus Review.

Its findings mirror what families live daily: unmet rights, inconsistent support, overstretched staff, and children being failed.

The recommendations are clear. What’s needed now is political will, accountability, and real investment.

Our children cannot wait.

Additional Support for Learning: review Additional Support for Learning Review - led by the Scottish Government's Professional Advisor for Education. Informed by existing evidence to focus on: national and local system conditions that support ASN delivery; experience of delivery in school and how policy translates into effective practice.

Sharing a beautifully-written and very important post this International Women’s Day. To all those female carers who show up every day, whose contributions aren’t covered by the media or rewarded with bonuses but without whom society would fall apart, we see you and we appreciate you.

Thank you to A Different Journey for this beautiful post.

On International Women’s Day, my social media feed will be filled with women who are, in every sense of the phrase, smashing it.

There will be founders and leaders, campaigners and creatives, women who have carved out space to build businesses, shape policy, create art, change culture. And I will celebrate them all, because their work and ambition matters.

But this year, I find myself thinking about a different kind of strength. I am thinking about the mums who stepped away from paid work because their child’s needs demanded it, and whose days are now shaped by care rather than career.

The women whose work begins long before sunrise and rarely ends when the lights go out. The ones whose days are shaped not by strategy meetings or growth targets, but by school emails that need careful emotional translation, by medication schedules, and by forms that ask them to prove their child’s needs again and again.

The women who have become experts in chasing, clarifying and correcting systems that rarely join up, who can recite diagnoses and dosages from memory, and who manage multi-agency communication with the diplomacy of seasoned negotiators.

From the outside, it can look as though they’re ‘not working.’ They’re not in an office whilst their children are at school, and there’s no salary appearing in their bank accounts at the end of the month.

But those hours of perceived freedom are often spent recovering from fractured nights of sleep, advocating for their child, researching, planning or preparing for meetings that will determine the shape of their future. It is labour that is largely invisible and entirely relentless.

Strength is often measured by what we build, launch, or lead. It is associated with upward movement and visible achievement. Yet there are women using every ounce of their intelligence and stamina not to climb, but to stabilise. Using their strength to hold steady, absorbing pressure so that a vulnerable child does not have to carry it alone.

Some women build companies - but some women build safety nets. Both require resilience, strategic thinking and courage.
What is rarely acknowledged is the cost. The careers paused or quietly abandoned, the pensions that will never quite look the same, and the financial vulnerability that hums beneath everyday decisions.

There are the creative ideas that sit in notebooks or floating somewhere in the backs of minds because there is simply no bandwidth left at the end of a day spent firefighting to make them a reality. It is not a lack of ambition - it’s a redirection of it. It is choosing, again and again, to pour skill and energy into safeguarding someone else’s wellbeing.

Visibility and value are not the same thing. Just because this work doesn’t trend or attract applause, does not make it smaller. In fact, much of our public infrastructure quietly relies on it. Unpaid carers prop up health services, education systems and social care structures that would struggle to function without them. The labour may take place around kitchen tables, in hospital waiting rooms and in bathrooms where five minutes of quiet feels like a luxury, but it is no less real for being domestic.

On International Women’s Day, I want to widen the lens just enough to include these women too. The ones who crave space to think freely and create something that belongs solely to them, but who are constantly channelling everything they have into managing sleepless nights, recurrent illness brought on by exhaustion, and advocacy they never imagined would become part of their identity. The ones who tried to do it all and discovered, through necessity rather than weakness, that something had to give.

You are not less driven because your drive is directed toward care.

You are not less capable because your competence plays out behind closed doors.

You are not less powerful because your strength is expressed through endurance rather than visibility.

Strength does not only exist in boardrooms and on stages. Sometimes it exists in the steady decision to stay, to learn, to co-ordinate, to protect, and to show up again tomorrow even when today has taken everything out of you.

This International Women’s Day, alongside the women breaking ceilings and building empires, I am celebrating the women who are holding entire worlds together in ways that few people ever fully see.

Strong - but not in the way you might expect.

A chance to share your views about breaks for carers with the Scottish Government. Because however much we love our children, we can’t pour from an empty cup…

The Scottish Government has launched a 12‑week consultation on the new Right to Breaks for carers in Scotland. This change to existing carers legislation aims to give unpaid carers stronger rights, so that anyone who is not getting sufficient breaks from caring can get the support they need to take a break.

Under this change in legislation, Local Authorities will have a duty to make sure carers get the support they need to take a sufficient break from caring. At the moment, they are proposing to do this using the information collected through Adult Carer Support Plans and Young Carer Statements.

The consultation is asking for your views on:
✅what “sufficient breaks” should mean
✅what types of breaks should be included in the new Right to Breaks
✅ timescales for preparing Adult Carer Support Plans and Young Carer Statements
✅how the transition to the new system should work

Your experiences and opinions will directly help shape the final regulations and guidance for these new rights. You can take part in the consultation here:
https://consult.gov.scot/dementia-and-unpaid-carers-unit/unpaid-carers-right-to-breaks-implementation/

We will also be holding engagement events with carers in the coming weeks so you will have more opportunities to discuss what this could mean for you. More details coming soon.

Today we celebrate as March 3rd Is

This is a plea to everyone to remember that not all disabilities are obvious and not to judge unfairly and without knowledge.

Just because a disability isn't seen it doesn't make it any less of a disability. Thousands of children with disabilities mask their needs in school everyday in order to 'fit in' as such they do not get the support they need to reach their potential. So next time you think "they don't show that behaviour in school" don't blame the parents or the home. Be aware that disability shows in different ways In different environments and for different people. start by listening to the parents and carers and more importantly to the children.

It feels like a battle every day and it doesn't have to be that way

It was all systems go at the REPAIR headquarters* yesterday for our first ever Town Hall meeting!

Many thanks to everyone who came along to share your concerns about support for children with additional support needs in Edinburgh, and ideas about how we can work together to make things better. We talked about the difficulty of getting diagnoses and identifying support, the importance of early intervention, responding to a Scottish Government consultation on school building standards, and more.

We managed to keep our promise to finish within an hour, but there were plenty more issues left to discuss, and we agreed to hold another Town Hall in the next few months. So don’t worry if you missed yesterday’s meeting - it was just the start of a new REPAIR tradition!

*Virtual headquarters. We don’t boast our own offices, but our tech guru managed to make everything run smoothly even so…

Good morning,

2 days to go!

Please find a flyer for our Town Hall attached below.

Thursday 26th Feb at 7pm - 8pm.

Please sign up and share with all ASN Families.

https://tinyurl.com/REPAIRTownHallSignUp

today's office

'Not Waving but Drowning'
Part 3 of our steering group member Gary Staercks ASN Series in the The Edinburgh Reporter
In the third part, he talks about the isolation and frustration we feel just trying to be social and maintain friendships. https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2026/02/opinion-the-loneliness-of-a-long-distance-asn-parent/

Part 1 - https://tinyurl.com/GSASN1
Part 2 - https://tinyurl.com/GSASN2

Opinion - The loneliness of a long distance ASN parent This is the third article in a series written by Gary Staerck the father of three daughters all of whom have Additional Support Needs (ASN). “We are not waving, but drowning.” It all starts with what questions we are asked, more importantly it’s the questions we are not asked which make things...

Gary, our technical wizz writes exclusively for the Edinburgh Reporter on his journey as an ASN Parent.
In the first of 3 articles published between today and Monday he discusses the battles you need to overcome in the search for support.

please share and discuss.

Opinion - How does a parent of ASN children cope? By Gary Staerck, a parent of three daughters. He is a founding member of the REPAIR (Edinburgh) Network and is also on the Board of Tailor Ed Foundation. Formerly a theatre and events professional and now a full-time carer for his family and an ASN advocate, Gary has also written two books of poetry...

Have you got a campaign idea? want to be more involved? want to know more about us?

Join us online on 26th Feb at 7pm

Sign up by scanning the QR code in a previous post or visiting https://tinyurl.com/REPAIRTownHallSignUp