Two weeks ago, he was in New Jersey with his fiancee Valerie as she gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Noa. The next day, he flew home and went straight to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to guest on stage with Jay-Z. Remarkably, as soon as Noa was delivered, he also found time to livestream from the US hospital to the launch event for his latest project: not an album, but a specialist school and assessment centre for neurodivergent children.
Giggs, 45, has teamed up with education charity the OMG Foundation, to launch St James House, a secondary school for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) and those in alternative provision, in Gravesend, Kent. It’s a project with extremely personal origins. We couldn’t get him diagnosed and he wasn’t getting the support and assessments he needed.
I thought, well, I’ve got to do something.” If Giggs is tired, you can’t tell from the way he bounds around the former business offices now being converted into a 75-pupil school. The Peckham-born musician has four children including his newborn; all three older kids are autistic. His eldest son, the rapper ML, was diagnosed more than a decade ago, in his early teens.
Last year, the father-and-son duo made a joint track about living with autism, Own Motion. It was just a man and woman in a room with a notepad and I thought, this is bullshit. How the fuck are they going to know if I’m autistic or not?
After five minutes, I walked out. I didn’t hear anything, but then 10 years later I was in the doctor’s and he looked at my notes and said, ‘It says here that you’re autistic. I was, like, ‘Is it?’ Because I didn’t even know.” Giggs belatedly learning his own diagnosis coincided with his battle to obtain diagnoses and education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for Israel and his daughter, Isla.
Last year, he went on Newsnight to rail against the flaws and inadequacies in the Send educational system. Israel was given his EHCP the next day. Yet this clearly isn’t an avenue for most parents struggling with the difficult, opaque Send system.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
