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Joanne Wacha: I Didn’t Know What Was Possible

Joanne Wacha was born in 1984 in Harrow, London. Joanne attended local mainstream primary and secondary schools and also spent time in hospital, attending the hospital school, after becoming ill at the age of thirteen. After school she went on to a local sixth form college, then a residential special college and then on to university.

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Joanne Wacha

Here Joanne talks about not being confident to ask for support

Transcript

They’d always say, if there’s any problem, let us know. If you don’t like the way things are, let us know, but I didn’t know what was wrong. There were times where, cos of my being partially sighted and having sight in one eye, I really should have said all the time, I need to be taken up to the front, but because I didn’t want to look different, I had to like, I just strained my eyes and squinted and I guess I just took it as having a LSA Learning Support Assistant next to me in certain subjects was how it was supposed to be and had to be. But yeah, no, nobody really did, I think they all expected you to know what you need and yeah, as a disabled person I should know what I need but I also I didn’t know what was out there to help me. Such as it would have been good to know if I had assisted technology to help on the computer because I hated using the computer because I couldn’t see it very well but I didn’t know that there was other technology out there to help me, until later on.

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