By Azibaolanari Okungbowa
A parent moves through a series of meetings. Not one meeting. Many.
A teacher on a Tuesday. A social worker the following week. A speech therapist the month after. A school nurse somewhere in between. Someone from the local authority when the paperwork finally comes through.
Each professional is there for the same child. And not one of them has spoken to the others.
I know that journey. I have made it more times than I can count. And every time, before a meeting even begins, there is a thought that arrives without being invited.
Here we go again. Sometimes I walk in scared. Sometimes apprehensive. Sometimes just tired. Tired before a single word has been spoken. It is not always that the same professional forgets. Health has the history. The health team know my child. But when social care comes in, I start again. When education needs something, I start again. Each agency holds its own fragment of my child’s story. None of them holds the whole.
And so, I become the one who carries it. Across every boundary. Into every room. Every time.
In the early years, I came to every meeting with everything I thought was necessary. Documents. Assessments. Letters. All of it.
Now, after years on this journey, I do not need the folder anymore. I carry the information in my head. His schedule. His history. His specific needs and the particular way each one shows up in different settings. I know it the way some people know the secret ingredient to eternal youth.
Nobody gave me that knowledge. The system handed me the job of holding it and I learned, because I had no choice.
What I was waiting for was the meeting where I did not have to do that. Where the system was already holding the picture and I could walk in as a parent, not as a filing cabinet.
That is not what the families in my research described. And the findings show why.
My research involved 50 families and professionals in Scotland, across five stakeholder groups, with more than 85 interview and focus group contributions, alongside 50 anonymous survey responses.
In the anonymous survey, 30 parent and carer respondents participated. 97 percent reported difficulty navigating support systems, and 87 percent said they repeated the same information to multiple professionals often or all the time.
When nobody in the system held the overview, families’ accounts describe absorbing that coordination work themselves.
So what does a structural response look like?
The Coherence Navigation Framework proposes three things that, if designed into a system from the start, could change the experience fundamentally.
Shared navigation. Someone holds the map. Not just for one meeting, not just for one referral, but across the whole journey. A named person with actual coordination authority, recognised by all agencies, who does not disappear when staff change or funding shifts.
Visible navigation. The pathway is transparent. Families can see what has been agreed, what happens next, and who is responsible for what. Professionals can see what others have already done. No more starting from scratch. No more repeating the story.
Supported navigation. This one I have seen done well, though not always by the statutory system.
The charities do it. They reach out. They follow through. If they have not heard from you in a while, they come to you. They ask whether your child needs anything. They make suggestions before you think to ask.
That is what supported navigation looks like in practice. Someone staying present without you having to chase them.
For families navigating Nigerian systems, that kind of institutional support may look different or be harder to find. But the underlying need for continuity, information and support does not disappear because the system is organised differently.
None of these three conditions is expensive to imagine. What they require is deliberate design.
The decision, made at a system level, that coherence is not something that will emerge naturally from well-meaning professionals. It must be built in.
This matters beyond Scotland.
Any country, any system, any context where agencies are expected to coordinate around vulnerable people without being designed to do so can produce these patterns.
The faces change. The policies change. The language changes. The structural problem remains.
I will be honest. I do not know if coherence will ever truly be designed in from the start.
Bureaucracy is real. Systems are slow. Change is hard.
But it is my desire and my hope that one day, not just for children with additional support needs but for all the systems that are supposed to serve people, coherence will stop being an accident and start being an intention.
That is what this research is working toward.
One framework at a time.
*This article draws on research by Azibaolanari Okungbowa, an independent researcher based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She developed the Coherence Navigation Framework through research involving 50 participants across five stakeholder groups in Scotland. Her research has been presented at international conferences in 2026, and is under peer review at an international journal, with a second manuscript in final preparation for submission.