Amplify Blog - No special treatment

Everyone knows one of the things that most teenagers hate is being made to feel different from everyone else; however this was exactly my experience of being a young person in care at school.

I remember going to a meeting at a new school at the start of the year with my new principal, deputy principal, year coordinator and the school guidance officer – this meeting was intended to welcome me to the school and discuss expectations of behaviour etc…

At the meeting I stressed that I did not want ‘special treatment’ because I was in care and I also didn’t want other teachers and students at the school to know about my personal situation.  The principal even stressed to me: ‘What’s said in this room stays in this room’.  I walked out of the meeting thinking we had an agreement but I was wrong because within 2 days everyone at the school knew my situation.  For me it wasn’t so much the students knowing that I was in care, it was the teachers – always bringing it up, mothering me, always over my shoulder…

Sometimes the ‘special treatment’ had its advantages; extensions to assignments came in handy even when not needed! But at the end of the day, my trust with the school was broken and I didn’t really have what you would call a ‘positive’ relationship with the school from then on.  I graduated, but looking back, perhaps I could have got more out of the situation…

This isn’t just my issue. I have heard other young people raise it and I think it’s something the education system and the child safety system needs to be more sensitive to.