As with many households we have been waiting anxiously for the letter informing us which school has offered our child a place. The options for Rosalie were made a little more complicated by our desire to find a fully wheelchair-accessible school to enable me to play a proper role as a parent.

While many of our local schools are technically “wheelchair accessible”, this can be a relative concept. Take our local redbrick. It has a small lift, but it took 15 minutes to locate the key and to use the lift I must be accompanied by a member of staff at all times.

We placed our three choices in order of preference based on our feelings about each school and found that, coincidentally, this also reflected accessibility. Our first choice was a school that was so good that halfway round our tour, I began to suspect that the children were actually highly skilled actors, performing wide-eyed reverence as the teacher bestowed gems of wisdom upon them. One class was even writing its own opera. The school building is all on one level and without so much as a threshold strip to speak of.

School No 2 is smaller, has good extracurricular activities and a step by the main gate. No 3 is a large, single-storey school that was designed and built in the Sixties. The classrooms are like little igloos, connected by a jumble of wide corridors. It’s all rather groovy, if in need of a lick of paint. Unfortunately, the pre-school section is on a different level and there is a “ramp” that appears to have been hastily constructed out of concrete many years ago. It is narrow and the wheelchair equivalent of a black run.

Whichever school Rosalie starts at next year I’m confident that she will be happy, opera or no opera. But I would like to take her to a school where it doesn’t require extra effort or assistance for me to get in and around the building. I don’t want any special attention; I just want to feel like any other dad.

www.timrushby-smith.com

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