Published on 12, July, 2020
I am totally devastated. I had a meeting planned today with my head teacher about how they could make reasonable adjustments for me at work. When I turned up it was the head and the deputy. I felt totally ganged up upon and it was as if they had planned before hand not to offer any help. They basically said that I am one of sixty staff all with their own needs and I am paid to be a teacher so I just need to get on with it.
The head kept grilling me with questions even when I had gone silent and started to cry.
I came out, drove home and had a complete meltdown. I eel awful and as if I am a great big inconvenience to the school.
It was just the worst.
Hi Raindrops,
I've been through this several times. While it can be character building in the end it's definitely a destructive process while you're going through it.
The biggest and most important thing to protect yourself is everything in writing. Even then you need to force the language to not be ambiguous, which can be even harder than forcing things to be in writing.
If they refuse to engage with you in writing, send them your notes in writing. You need to be as diplomatic and reasonable as possible and really give them every chance while stopping them from being able to play games. It's unfair and it's hard, doesn't always work but I've found can be key at least to emotionally moving on.
This can be something as simple as an email thanking them for the meeting and asking for a Timeline on when they think they may consider reviewing what adjustments they can make. Something diplomatic that puts the responsibility on them to react. Explicitly mentioning things like the equality act are very effective as well, but be prepared for an aggressive reaction unfortunately if you chose to assert yourself in this way.
In my experience the response normally comes back verbally, which I had to follow up by emailing notes back and me being labelled as aggressive etc.
It took me three constructive dismissals to learn how to use these tools to defend myself, importantly though they work. Happy to help pass on my experiences if you want more help.