11-year-old girl tried to end her life after being told there was nothing wrong with her

Silver Taylor and her family have faced a decade-long fight for her to receive appropriate education which has led to her living around 200 miles away due to no appropriate facilities existing in Wales

By the time Silver Taylor was 11 she had already tried to take her own life, and she would soon make her second attempt. Her family believe these were the result of her being dismissed and denied proper support from her schools and the NHS, despite her clear signs of neurodiversity.

Her mum Sarah has opened up about her 10-year fight for Silver to receive appropriate education and care, which culminated in a legal fight against her local authority in Carmarthenshire. It saw the council concede to a request to move “caring and resilient” Silver to a specialist residential school, Alderwasley Hall.

Although this allowed Silver to thrive and reach her full potential, the centre is 200 miles away from the family’s home in Llangeler because a specialist centre of the like does not exist in Wales. Explaining why she feels compelled to speak out, with her daughter’s wish, Sarah told WalesOnline: “It’s because of the whole relentlessness of the hoops you are made to jump through.

“You have to constantly raise concerns and so many doors are shut in parents’ faces and there is no support for the child; they are left to flounder.

“Silver can’t be the only one, but where are they? There are no facilities like Alderwasley Hall in the whole of Wales. It gave her a future.”

Describing how Silver’s traumatic school experience began, Sarah said: “Before she started school at about four Silver had always been a little bit quirky, but you think that’s just how she is.

“But then she didn’t really speak in school for the first couple of years. I went to a parents’ evening and the teacher asked how I thought Silver was doing and I raised that she had no social skills and no friendship group.

“The teacher said she was really glad I had raised that because that’s exactly what she thought – but that’s where the support ended.”

At the age of six Sarah said Silver was referred to her school’s nurse and then to a paediatrician under Hywel Dda University Health Board.

A year later Sarah said Silver finally had an appointment before a second one six months later to follow up on her development. When Sarah told them nothing had changed, she said Silver was referred to the neurodevelopmental team for an autism assessment.

However, it wasn’t until Silver turned 11 that she would have this assessment – by which point she had completed primary school having received no significant support for her difficulties.

Sarah said: “She went all the way through primary school without significant support. She had little bits and pieces like a social skills meeting or having a teaching assistant play a game at the door to try and get her into school.

“They basically just left her. I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall saying she is really struggling.

“She had no friendships, she didn’t have a clue how to play. Academically she was behind because she couldn’t understand what was going on in the classroom and she couldn’t keep up with instructions.

“She even struggled with things like handwriting and pencil grip or doing her buttons while getting changed for PE. She had no coordination and she had no occupational therapist during that time.”

Sarah said this manifested in anxiety so severe that from the age of seven Silver often made herself sick to try to avoid going to primary school, or to ensure she would be sent home.

Sarah believes that an earlier autism diagnosis could have made a difference to Silver in those formative years, perhaps ensuring she had tailored support.

She said: “I complained to the health board about the amount of time young people are waiting. At the time there was a 26-week target for assessment – I asked what happened to that and was told the referral sits there when they receive it and that the clock doesn’t start ticking until that referral is looked at.

“So because it was picked up in the May before she turned 11, she had her assessment in the August and her result in the October, they said they bet their target.”

Despite her difficulties in primary school Sarah said Silver “just about got through it” but she said when Silver made the move to secondary school “that’s when the wheels really started to fall off”.

She said: “You’ve got a bigger environment, a noisier environment and so many changes throughout the day: different subjects, different teachers – and she just couldn’t cope with that. By the October of her first year in year 7 she had started self-harming.”

Sarah said that prior to this she had made sure to inform the school about Silver’s recent autism diagnosis in the form of a handwritten letter to senior staff. In the letter Sarah requested a meeting to discuss what support would be put in place for Silver.

However, Sarah claims she did not hear back from the school until October after Silver confided in someone that she had harmed herself. Sarah said she went into the school to ask for a meeting, which finally happened a couple of weeks later.

“I had a meeting with [senior staff] and they put little pieces in place, such as she could have her lunch with [a staff member] as they noticed she wasn’t making friends, but nothing major.

“They said we would meet again a month later to see how things were progressing – it was April before we met.”

In April Sarah said the meeting was supposed to be an individual development plan meeting where a detailed plan was supposed to have been put in writing to set out the support Silver should and would receive during her time at school.

However, Sarah later requested all information and data regarding her daughter via a subject access request and discovered that this plan did not exist.

By the end of year seven Sarah said Silver had begun making attempts on her own life. After her first attempt Silver was referred to the health board’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). However Sarah claims she did not receive help having been told that “all autistic people are anxious”.

CAMHS was contacted again after Silver’s second attempt, and she was offered several therapy sessions. However, Sarah said these sessions were not appropriate for Silver, who struggled to understand and talk about her feelings in a conventional way.

“She stopped attending school two weeks into year eight because I was so concerned it was going to result in her loss of life, so I just stopped sending her,” Sarah said.

It wasn’t until Easter that year that the local authority arranged for a tutor to visit Silver at home, but again Sarah said this tutor was not an autism specialist and so the sessions were not appropriate for Silver.

Around the same time Silver had a Statement of Special Educational Needs (SSEN) completed, which is a legal document that outlines a child’s complex special educational needs and the support they must receive to meet those needs.

This resulted in Silver being moved to the inclusion unit at her school, which is a more specialist department for children with additional needs with the aim of integrating them back into mainstream education.

However, Sarah said this did not work for Silver’s specific needs, and so she continued to suffer with debilitating anxiety which resulted in more self harm.

Sarah said: “There were boys in her class and one girl so she still didn’t have anyone to socialise with. Academically, they were all behind what Silver was capable of. In year nine she limped through with the self harm still happening in the background.

“In year 10 she had to choose her subject options which took her back into mainstream school for all but five hours a week. We were back in the same situation again. She couldn’t cope with that in year seven or eight and she couldn’t cope with it at this point.”

Silver’s anxiety resulted in her missing a lot of school during year 10, but a turning point was just around the corner.

It came when Sarah – who juggled working shifts at the NHS – contacted a law firm to help her obtain a more robust and accurate SSEN that better reflected Silver’s needs.

She said: “I had got in touch with education law firm HCB Solicitors while she was in year nine because was really struggling with the whole system and the legal system was not parent friendly.”

Sarah explained that HCB immediately arranged for independent specialists to make assessments and draft comprehensive reports about Silver and her needs.

Crucially, a private assessment by Dr Chris Wade found Silver to have “severe expressive language difficulties,” directly contradicting the school’s and NHS’s previous findings.

Rob Price, head of education law at HCB Solicitors, said: “The local authority’s initial response was to try and discredit Dr Wade’s assessment rather than admit they’d gotten things badly wrong.

“This level of resistance and resource waste is shocking when a child’s future is at stake.”

Carmarthenshire council conceded to the firm’s request for a change of placement to Alderwasley Hall, a specialist residential school, just a week before a scheduled tribunal.

Every recommendation from HCB’s experts was finally added to Silver’s SSEN.

Despite an initial delay due to the Covid pandemic, Silver started at Alderwasley Hall in Derbyshire in June 2020, at the age of 15. The transformation has been profound, Sarah said.

Now 20 and coming to the end of Year 15 at Alderwasley, Silver is thriving. She will leave Alderwasley in July with seven strong GCSEs and is on track to achieve a distinction in her level three health and social care qualification. For the past two years, she has also been attending a local college with support.

Most remarkably, Silver has received unconditional offers from all the universities she applied to, including Swansea University.

She plans to attend the University of Gloucester in September to pursue a level four qualification in Health and Social Care, with aspirations to work in mental health or social work.

Sarah said: “Alderwasley was a completely different kettle of fish. There were smaller classes and each student had one to one support in class all day.

“Staff were trained and completely clued up about autism and ADHD. She was much better there and she made friendships, she found her tribe.

“Every single student was like her, she wasn’t the odd one out. Everyone was someone she could relate to. It wasn’t a magic wand, there’s a lot of trauma there and she was diagnosed with PTSD because of what she previously went through in school.”

Sarah said that although she is so glad that Silver was able to attend the school with the help of HCB, she worries about other children and families out there who do not have access to legal aid.

She also described how emotionally tough it was for her to see Silver move so far away when she had experienced such serious mental health difficulties over the years.

“Nobody can understand how it feels to have to send your child away, but I didn’t actually have a choice. I would have lost her.

“If it hadn’t been for HCB, my child would be dead. That’s not being dramatic, that’s a fact. Without their help we never would have gotten to this point.

“I’m lucky that I was in a position to do that, but there are many parents who can’t. Who helps parents who haven’t got the finances to be able to do that?”

In response to WalesOnline Liz Carroll, service director of the mental health and learning difficulty clinical care group at Hywel Dda University Health Board, said:

“We are unable to comment on individual cases due to patient confidentiality. We are always sorry to hear when our service and the patient’s experience do not meet the level expected of us.

“We acknowledge that our waiting lists are longer than we would like but we are continually working to improve our services and to reduce our waiting times.

“The health board provides a dedicated single point of referral service for children and young people under the age of 18, which means we can offer rapid help and support five days a week from 9am to 5pm.

“The Children and Mental Health service also provide a 24/7 crisis assessment and intervention service, including a dedicated crisis Hub based in Carmarthen that is there to support children and / or young people who may be going through a mental health crisis.”

A Welsh Government spokesman said: “Our additional learning needs (ALN) reforms aim for long-term systemic change so children and young people with ALN receive the support they need.

“Since 2020, we have provided significant funding to support learners with ALN across Wales. This includes more than £150 million to support ALN implementation, an over £170 million investment in special schools, specialist resource bases and mainstream settings and a further £80 million to improve facilities.

“Going forward, projects worth over £750 million are planned over the next nine years to continue to improve and expand existing facilities and create new specialist provision.”

Carmarthenshire council cabinet member for education and Welsh language Cllr Glynog Davies said: “Following the full identification of Silver’s needs during the secondary phase of her education, Carmarthenshire County Council supported Silver and her family while an appropriate school provision was accessed.

“We are pleased that Silver has now successfully completed Post 16 education and wish her the best for the future.”

Anyone seeking help can call Samaritans 24/7 free on 116 123 or visit Samaritans.org.