DD2 has just BEGGED me not to send her to school

[lougle]

She's had the most lovely time with her cousins - a sleepover then a day out with them. But it transpires that they've been telling her not to suck her hand in the last couple of days, as do the children at school, and the teachers at school.

She's just begged me to be a 'home learner'.

The saddest thing was when she said 'I really want to learn at home but I'm worried that if I do miss my friends I won't know the way to their houses when they invite me over to play.' The truth is, she doesn't have any friends to be invited to play with. She associates with the other children, but none would be 'friends'. That's why it was so precious to go and spend time with her cousin (same age, same year group, same school, different class).

It kills me to hear her distress and I know that she knows we keep ignoring her pleas. I can't work out if we genuinely think it's the best for her (she is a child, after all, so we can't let her unilaterally make decisions), or if we're just chicken.

[lougle]

Four years, zzzzz
I'll do that. Tomorrow.

[lougle]

Do you think he would be less academically behind if he was at school for those years, zzzzz?

I have reservations about HE. I have reservations about leaving her in school. I don't know what is right for her. I do know that it isn't normal for a 6 year old who is in the middle of the school holidays to be beside herself with distress about returning to school

Re. How we would do it... I don't know. There are several really good HE groups in our area (we live in a village that is equidistant to 3/4 major towns/cities so can hook into any of them). I know 2 HE families. One is HEing their 5 yr old (took him out of school after 3 weeks) and won't be sending their two year old. The other is HEing their 9 year old, whilst their 10yr old is schooled at DD1's special school.

I think if DD2 was fairly happy at school I'd be fine with it, but I don't think they've understood her yet at all. It can only get worse when the new curriculum comes in because, for example, year 3 maths concepts are being moved down to year 2, etc., which is going to make it even harder for DD2.

If DD2 was struggling academically but thriving socially, it would be OK. But she's struggling in that sense too and I do think the gap is going to widen in year 3. But she's never going to get their attention because they think she's s not-that-clever girl who is inattentive, etc, instead of seeing that she can't learn the way they teach.

[bochead]

It used to be very easy to switch between home ed and school throughout a child's career. You could easily home ed for a term (I did), a year, or even 5 years so long as you didn't expect to return a child to school ban smack in the middle of year 11, and expect the school to be happy about it.

However the further up the age range you get the more any issues your child has would be more likely to be blamed on a period of home edding than genuine special needs by teaching staff. In other words I'm not so sure seemless reintegration into the school system if you ever want to is easy as it was even 5 years ago from the anecdotal evidence I have. As a result I now wouldn't advise anyone to home ed without first thinking through when or if they would ever want to return to school and how.

I think this is largely due to the crazy pressure Gove is putting schools at the moment under rather than deliberate on the part of schools too - they just aren't getting the headspace to think beyond increasing narrowing parameters anymore, even when they desperately want to.

This isn't trying to put you off home edding btw (I'm doing it) just I think people should have as much info as possible before making the leap iyswim. Home ed isn't without risks. The biggest I can think of is that you may lose the right to any theraputic support your child may have had in school such as SALT or OT and that also you have financially fund EVERYTHING from text books, to exam fees to assistive technologies (from wobble cushions to ipads).

For me the funding issues and curriculum etc was a lot easier to deal with than the evil carrots as we were treated terribly. DS wasn't making academic progress so him falling further behind wasn't a concern, esp as his mental health was my priority.

That leads to my 3rd caveat - don't take the leap before properly investigating your local home ed scene and the social activities available to you. Our kids are all so individual that an appropriate social outlet for one child is guaranteed to be another's worst nightmare. Home ed groups also range from the truly inclusive to the worst examples of petty bitchy judgey pants cliques you've ever seen.

[lougle]

There is so much to think about and I really appreciate you both being so brutally honest. It's much easier to present the candy floss side of anything you do.

Emotionally I think I'm in a place where, if I'm honest, I'm concerned that if my prediction is right, and DD2 gets much worse as she gets older (she is unrecognisable now compared to her 4 year old self in terms of anxiety) then I will wonder if we could have 'saved her'from it by listening to her and taking her out. Whether it would be our fault that she was how she was.

In terms of services, she gets none. The wobble cushion DD2 was told would be ordered hasn't appeared. The SENCO made it clear that the OT only said she'd get it because DD2 claimed to be a fidget bum. She was meant to be doing a sensory profile with me but since visiting the school I haven't even had a report, let alone contact. I have a TAC meeting at the end of the month but it's very obviously going to be a time to tell me I'm neurotic and she's fine.

What would we do? DD2 can read well -it's the one area she's ahead in. So I am not worried about that. Maths I think we'd need to go back to basics and start again. DD2 learns practically, so I think I'd aim to weave maths into everyday life mainly, before tackling maths on paper. For example, when we're doing the vegetable patch the seed plants are potted in twelves, so we could look at the 2x, 3x, 4x, and 6x tables just by looking at the planters.

It struck me the other day that we try and make children describe things without ever explaining why it's important or what happens if you don't. When we were out for a walk, we saw lots of different yellow flowers. I think DD2 would understand better if, for instance, she had 6 or 7 different yellow flowers in front of her and she had to describe one that she wanted me to find. She would see that it isn't enough to say 'the yellow flower' because that could be any of them. similarly, if she said 'the yellow flowers with four petals', that might only narrow the choices to three flowers, etc.

I think that DD2 needs things to be far more obvious and explicit.

I do agree that the sacrifice would be my free time in the week. But I do have my mum and dad who live a mile away. Dad would give her a weekly cooking lesson, I'm sure.

DD3 has already said that it won't be fair when she heard DD2 asking, but to be honest she's a school shaped person -she thrives there and had year 5 children stopping to hug her and say bye at the end of the school day by about the second week of starting! I always say that 'fair'is not 'the same', it's 'the right thing, for the right person, at the right time.' DD1 goes to a different school for that reason.

In essence, our options are:

1. Accept that this is as good as it gets for DD2. She's not going to get help until she completely falls apart. I'm going to be called neurotic until that point. Last night she completely feel apart, but had been wonderfully behaved during the day and I know my sister in law would not have believed how DD2 was in the evening unless she saw it.
   

1. Move her to yet another school. I'm not sure it would be better. DH works at a local Junior school and the administrator suggested to DH that DD2 may be happier there because DH is there are either end of the school day. I think that any problems would be put down to three schools in 3 years, though.
   

1. Home educate her. It would need to be done so carefully, to make sure she didn't isolate herself. We'd have to make sure we regularly attended group events.
   

I don't think there is a perfect option for DD2.

DH read zzzzz's post last night and was willing to do the pros and cons exercise. He is worried about DD2. He's far more open to HE now than he was last year.

My Mum and Dad are very concerned about DD2. They are unsure about home Ed as a concept, but see a stark difference when she's home from school.

[Ineedmorepatience]

So feel for

[Ineedmorepatience]

Stupid phone!!
So feel for you lougle I am in the same position with Dd3 she is depserate to be HE'd, school is too much for her to cope with.

It is a very hard decision to make though isnt it.

[lougle]

Very, I need. Especially when they can't articulate the issues clearly.

[Ineedmorepatience]

Yes Dd3 just says she hates it. She cant really tell me why. I can tell as soon as I look at her if she has had a difficult day. Her school have tried to reduce her stress levels at the end of the day. They dont get that the thing that has upset her could have happened at 9.01 in the morning and she has been stressing about it all day. Taking her out of class at 3pm doesnt get rid of the stress because nobody actually asks her how she is!!

I just think most schools are so far from understanding Asd that they will continue to flounder around not listening to us while our children suffer

[lougle]

Financially can you afford it? we're not well off, but we'd jiggle the budget.

Do you have a good library? We are 5 minute's walk from the local library and the big libraries are 20 minutes drive away.

You are tied to term times which can be limiting, can you work around that? we'd have to. School times would limit us too, but it's unavoidable.

How will you get time for smear tests and Hairdressers, or to read a book or pay bills? luckily DH works split shifts, so from 9.30-2.45 we're both around.

Do you have room? yes. We have a dining room. The is a desk in the room that the younger DDs share. We have a biggish garden.

Will you follow the old national curriculums? I think I'd try to take the info as a guage on how we're doing, but I'd want to focus on the areas DD2 is interested in and help DD2 to learn the core skills through them, at least initially. She's to fixated on being 'terrible at maths' to do formal maths work initially, I think. She'd respond better to me pointing out that she's learned some maths while she was cooking, etc.
Have an exit plan.

[lougle]

Have an exit plan good point.

She's been in tears today because she might miss 'Lucy who let's me play pretend horses with her.'Some gentle questions revealed that she's not particularly fussed about Lucy, she just wants to be able to play pretend horses.

She's so tricky to understand. She says there is nothing that would make school better, cries when she's thinking of leaving her friends and teacher, then in the next breath days that she really wants to be a home learner.

[ouryve]

DS1 is like this with friends. There's some boys he is close to and a lot of the kids at school think the world of him, but he never goes to other children's houses and by your DD's age, wouldn't even contemplate it. He often blanks them outside school, but has become better at walking alongside a few of them on the way home from school, instead of bolting, when he sees them. He also gets on like a house on fire with my sister's DC's, who are a couple of years older, but they live 100 miles away, so he only sees them a few times a year.

The times when he has been off school in term time, either because of physical health problems or when he's been mentally falling apart and I've kept him home for a day or 3 (or he's refused completely) he has missed the friends he has at school. We don't have the support and networks that you have, though. I've also found it very hard on myself and don't have the energy to work with him and keep on top of the house. He's very, um, intense.

In your case, I think making that list would be helpful. Reassure her that you're not going to make any rash decisions, but let's use the summer term to find out what all the possibilities are and work out how you all feel about them.

[CaisleanDraiochta]

I'm in a similar position with my DD, who sounds quite like your DD. She is in yr3 but things have never been right for her since reception at school. I had been looking into home ed for a while myself and had kind of planned to take her out of school from next Sept, so the beginning of Yr4, initially for a year to see if home ed was better suited to her than school is.

However, about 2 months ago DD herself began begging me to let her go to 'homeschool' instead and since then she has had a lot of time off through refusal and also being sent home due to extreme anxiety in school. She is adamant she will not be going back after the Easter holidays and I'm at the point of just letting that happen now tbh.

She is so far behind academically that really being home eded can't make anything worse. Socially the gap between her and her peers is widening all the time and that is leading to increased anxiety in school which is impacting on her ability to learn. DD has said the only good thing about school is her friends though, but actually of the children (half her list of school friends are the teachers/TAs/dinner ladies) in school she counts as friends, we see almost all of them outside of school anyway. I strongly feel that in DD's case, her 'learning time' and her 'social time' need to be separated out, as when she is made to try and do both at once (as happens in school) she fails miserably at both.

anyway, sorry for the ramble about us, I've gone off topic. Have you thought about maybe asking your GP to sign DD2 'off sick' with anxiety for a month? Then you could use that time to give home ed a go and see how it works out, before having to actually commit by de-regeristering her from school.

[bochead]

A lot of families move to the Isle of Wight specifically for the home ed scene there. Local groups really vary hugely across the country.

There's no way I'll send my lad back into school as he's thriving in a way not seen since nursery, but there isn't a perfect solution out there for children like ours, just a best compromise amongst the crap a iyswim. I'm retraining so I can work from home - as a lone parent giving up all hope of returning to my previous career was a big sacrifice.

[lougle]

We live not too far from the IOW. The

[bochead]

IOW is also famous for david icke .

DS has found splitting being social and learning a huge relief this year as we've home edded. Getting to 9 with an average level of general intelligence and unable to read properly was a major catalyst for me - thinking well I can't do any worse than school has iyswim!

What has been a HUGE advantage has been being able to prompt social skills in so many real life informal situations so that stuff he just couldn't generalise before is now embedded. He's had the time and space between social interactions to process, reflect and figure how to do things better in future, rather than just lurching from one mistake to another with no respite. As a result he's made a couple of huge developmental leaps I don't think would have happened had he remained in the pressurised environment of school.

I've had the time to work properly through a few resources like language for thinking, the asbergers handbook etc at a sensible pace, and to regularly use resources like our story cubes to their greatest effect. I remain unconvinced that just 30 mins social skills group in school is the answer without home and TA constantly prompting seamlessly & totally coordinated - which doesn't happen often enough irl.

I don't think the online schools will suit ALL children, some will be fundamentally unsuited to it as a way of learning, just as DS seems fundamentally a square peg in a round hole in mainstream. I worry particularly about those children who need face to face reassurance, or that have naturally poor concentration skills in particular. Online school certainly shouldn't be seen as a panacea for all ills .

Briteschool also only takes children from Year 5 onwards, as generally they need a certain level of general maturity for this method of learning to be effective. There are lots of alternate correspondance homeschool curriculii for younger kids, particularly if you look at US based commercial ones around now though.

It may be the case that as your child is younger there is a specialist unit locally worth fighting for. Funding changes may be one reason why it's getting harder to get older home edded children back into schools with ease now - noone wants a year 5 or 9 who needs specialist equipment/too much TA time perhaps? I'm not sure, and it is only anecdotal stuff I've heard of late, not personal experience. Everything seems so postcode dependent now that it's getting harder and harder to give generalised advice. Even public library services vary massively depending on location!

[bochead]

You've made me feel better about the crushing guilt I felt about leaving DS in school so long - without it I wouldn't have got SALT(which took a Tribunal and a portion of my soul to obtain) which means he wouldn't have been at the point where online school was a possibility and I doubt he'd have made the reading progress he has this year as receptive language has to be at a certain level before reading can be sensibly acquired as a skill iyswim. Briteschool is only working for us as the software allows you to listen to lesson recordings as many times as you need to - Interhigh for instance doesn't offer this facility so is pretty useless for DS.

There just isn't a perfect solution methinks for a significant minority of children. I do appreciate the fact that family and friends are 110% behind my homeschool attempts and would kick off if I weakened and sent him back to school now. The opinions of our nearest and dearest make a huge difference to our morale, and on days when I doubt myself just hearing an outsider saying they think I'm doing the right thing for DS can make all the difference in the world.

How you homeschool if your extended family loathe the idea I don't know, as it is hard to swim against the tide of conventional society. (I've always been an innately conservative type).