Why I built Aro

I’m Nat. I live in Hertfordshire with my wife and our three children.

When our daughter found school too overwhelming, we spent a long time trying to get her the support she needed. The pressure around attendance, and the constant need to prove that she was struggling, took such a toll that in the end we made the decision to deregister her from school.

Today she’s back in school, with an EHCP in place. We’ve come full circle.

Then our twins started school, and we began to see a familiar pattern.

I tried to keep on top of everything: the emails, the referrals, the phone calls, the conversations with teachers, and everything we were seeing at home. I studied law at university and I’m a bookkeeper, so keeping records and making order out of chaos is what I do every day. And it turns out it’s just not possible to do on your own.

Both of our twins have now been unable to attend school for months.

If you’ve lived it, you’ll know it isn’t a child who won’t go. It’s a child who can’t. Not yet, and not like this. And you’ll know how much comes with it: the meetings where you have to prove, again, what you already know about your own child, the deadlines, the waiting lists, the searching for one email at eleven o’clock at night.

So I built Aro, as a tool to help my family first. Somewhere to keep each child’s story together. Something that remembers the deadlines, notices when a promise hasn’t been kept, spots the patterns, and helps me write the email when I don’t have the words left.

Aro can’t fix a broken system, and I won’t pretend it can. What it can do is carry some of the weight, so you have more clarity, more control and a stronger footing to challenge things when you need to. And so more of your energy goes where it belongs: with your child.

Now I’d like it to help your family too. If you’d like to try it early and help shape it, I’d love to hear from you.

Nat