Can you spot the difference?

You might think that being a teacher would make it easy to identify your own child's special needs. Think again. Trevor Averre-Beeson talks from experience.

In a 26-year career in teaching, 12 as a headteacher in three London schools, I might have been expected to be able to identify my own daughter's special educational needs. Daughters one and two sailed through secondary school emerging with a string of As and A s. Victoria, now a teacher and Samantha, at university, made parenthood effortless.

Annie, who is 12, has had an altogether more challenging journey. From birth, she had one eye closed and the other rolling for many weeks. Annie was in and out of Hammersmith Hospital children's wing for her first three years as her muscles took years rather than months to strengthen enough to hold her head and learn to walk.

It was to be several more years before I would learn exactly what was meant by dyspraxia, nine years in total of Annie's life before a health worker or educationist would put us all on a road to help understand her world.

It was as a deputy headteacher at a school in Essex that I received a distraught call from my wife saying that the health visitor had said Annie, then one, may never walk or talk. Several months later in a specialist centre for children with mobility difficulties, the therapist told us that she would in all probability never walk. I asked how many times...