Sometimes, children can seem hidden away from the public, kept apart in their nurseries and schools. Equally, staff in office blocks can feel trapped behind phones and screens, and miss any sense of connectedness or belonging.
When the singing ended, a member of the audience asked me if I remembered her. Her child had attended the nursery where I worked years ago as the special needs co-ordinator. He had struck me as having an unusual way of talking and relating to the other children, and the more I observed and spoke to his parents, the more we began to realise he might have special needs.
The services worked together and he was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder shortly afterwards. During his final year in nursery we worked very hard on supporting his play and friendships.
There was some controversy among the professionals about this - some of the team felt that we should concentrate more on his basic communication and early life skills. But his mother, many years later, remembered with great fondness the 'special books' about his play, his love of the outdoors, and his early friendship with another boy. It had been just the start he needed, she said.
Earlier that week, I had been helping my daughter with her science homework about solids, liquids and gases. I was amazed by how much of what we think of as a solid material, like wood, is actually 'space'. Imagine an atom, with a nucleus in the middle and electrons orbiting around it. If you scaled up that nucleus to the size of a football, the space between the nucleus and those electrons would be huge. So when we think of something as solid, what we really mean is that the bonds binding everything together are incredibly strong.
Watching the children as they made their way out of Tower Hamlets Town Hall, and remembering that little autistic boy playing in nursery more than a decade ago, I thought of how the bonds that hold us together can make us really strong in the early years, even when the gaps seem huge.
