When Canary Collective named the truth about incident reports, they articulated something already deeply known—something felt in the gut, carried in the silences of meetings, and confirmed by the absence of a child’s voice in the official version of events.
Their words moved slowly and powerfully, affirming what many parents have experienced but been denied the language to describe: that incident reports often serve institutional protection, not child wellbeing, and that they erase the context, the provocation, the adult role, and the conditions that made rupture inevitable.
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Fighting for transparency via FOI requests
For parents of disabled children, the struggle for transparency often feels like fishing in murky waters, straining for glimpses of the truth beneath a bureaucratic surface designed to obscure, rather than reveal. It was this feeling that drove me to file a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for records pertaining to my children at their […]
This response affirms that these forms are rarely neutral—they are crafted to shield schools from responsibility while marking students, especially disabled students, as risks. It urges families to request these reports and ask critical questions: who wrote them, what was left out, whether the staff’s actions were included, and whether the school fulfilled its legal duty to accommodate. It calls on educators to write truthfully or refuse to file, and it calls on systems to acknowledge that every omission is a failure to reflect, to inquire, and to act justly.
Above all, it holds the child’s account as essential. It demands that children’s perspectives be documented, dignified, and central. And it ends with a commitment to keep telling the stories that the reports leave out—to speak what the system refuses to name, and to hold institutions accountable for the harm they file and forget.
