After a long battle, we eventually got the diagnoses for our little boy of Autism for our son at around three years old.

Above our son, Jasmine and Phil and below a link to Jasmine's blog about his diagnostic journey click here

One of our immediate concerns, knowing for sure that he wasn't just going to grow out of his behaviors, was which school he could attend.

And so over the next year, we fought to get an educational health care plan in order get him the best chance of an education that would meet his needs.

He's classed none verbal, Autistic. Which is misleading, because he can and does make a lot of noise, but most of it isn't speech. What it means he has almost no spoken language.

So he can't respond with a yes or no to a question and he can't tell you when he needs something or if something is bothering him. As you can guess life and education for him was going to be a challenge.

The first special needs school told us they only took older children who had in effect failed in a mainstream school, so he'd have to go to one of those first and fail before they would consider taking him.

So we went to several local schools and asked if they felt they would be able to teach and keep safe a little boy who showed no signs of speech, along with some disruptive and self-harming tendencies.

They couldn't.

That left us with a single school 28 miles away.

On viewing Mowbray school in Bedale we knew it was the right place for him. It's a wonderful school, with a farm and an environment that we felt he would respond to. The staff are amazing and are motivated to adapt to children like our son's, particular set of skills rather than try and mould him to a standard school environment.

We were desperate for him to go there.

But at first, it didn't look like they would have a place for him, it does, after all, cover a catchment area covering some 1400 square miles, from Stockton on Tees to Harrogate.

However, they had a plan in place for a satellite school, in Ripon and 9 months on and he's now attending that school.

It's still a work in progress. Much of the school is still an active building site however it's coming together, and they hope to be able to expand it to be able to take up to 60 pupils eventually.

We're fundraising to help them provide more places for more children who need a special place in which to learn. A place filled with extraordinary people to help them achieve all they can and to live their best lives in an often intolerant world.