What specific help does your preschool/reception child with ASD get?

[BrilliantineMortality]

DD has suspected ASD. Concerns were raised by preschool last autumn and the senco has referred her to a paediatrician, but our appointment isn't until August. A specialist teacher is due to observe DD, but there is no date for this yet.

DD has always been anxious and she is now starting to refuse to go to preschool. She says she is scared, preschool makes her feel sad, she has no friends, she doesn't feel safe . This week has been a pattern of going one day,but refusing the next.

I have kept up communication with her preschool. They are sympathetic and have come up with strategies to get her in the next day (tomorrow remains to be seen), but it's very much firefighting. She clearly needs further support right now, but I don't know what to ask for. Is there any support available without a diagnosis or EHCP? What can preschool do for her now?

It's late and I'm off to bed now but will check in tomorrow. Thanks in advance.

[stopgap]

This is probably zero help at all, as I live in the US, but my son's preschool also raised concerns, and so he was referred to our local town's special services department, who did an o/t and speech evaluation, plus a school psychologist administered the ADOS test. He was found to be on the spectrum, so was moved to our local primary school's pre-k, and as part of his hours he gets two sessions of occupational therapy, two sessions of pragmatic speech and a separate social skills play group. My son is thriving there.

The original preschool tried very hard to make my son more comfortable by providing a pictorial depiction of the day's schedule, a teacher would hold him during transition periods when he would get anxious, and they provided a small trampoline for him to bounce and get some sensory needs met.

How old is your DD? My son essentially slipped under the radar because he met his milestones; only when he turned three did it become apparent that he was really struggling on a social basis with other kids.

[BrilliantineMortality]

Thanks StopGap. My daughter is 4.3. Concerns were first raised when she was 3.9 when she had been at preschool a couple of months.

Similarly for us, it's as she's getting older it's becoming more apparent that she's struggling socially.

Her preschool has done work with the children in small groups to help with areas they may be finding difficult, but even they admit that these sessions made little difference to DD.

[AgnesDiPesto]

A few years ago now but DS initially got 1:1 funding for 12/15 hours (in practice the nursery made this up to 100% themselves). He got 2-3 visits from SLT over about 9 months who gave 'advice' to the nursery but didn't design any programmes. He saw the early years teacher once who gave the nursery very basic 'advice' to 'keep them going' until he got his diagnosis.

After diagnosis the autism outreach team went in and gave more 'advice' mainly simplistic stuff like taking pictures off the wall to make it low stim, buying him a pop up tent and using visuals (none of which he responded to because he was so withdrawn and passive, he avoided the low stim area as has few sensory issues). Outreach said they would go weekly but actually went 2-3 times, then the person left and no-one went again for months.

SLT and autism outreach spent several months arguing whose responsibility it was to teach social skills with the result neither ever did (apart from constantly recommending turn taking practice)

We paid privately for ABA consultant to train us and we worked with him at home and paid for ABA to provide some advice to nursery - which they found far more useful. We also applied for Statement (now EHCP) right at the start and after 15 months and 2 appeals won a full-time ABA programme at tribunal by comparing what we had achieved at home via ABA and how much more useful the nursery found it - to what the statutory services had provided.

we bought the nursery books e.g. More than Words Hanen to give them ideas.

None of the advice from SLT or autism outreach was anything you couldn't read in a £5.99 intro to autism book. It was very basic awareness and strategies. Autism outreach was heavily criticised by the Tribunal for not putting in robust programmes of intervention themselves.

Some families (whose children were not in nursery) got weekly portage visits which they found more useful than SLT/autism outreach and indeed many of them put off getting a diagnosis so they wouldn't lose portage and have to transfer to autism outreach.

I would suggest you look at Caudwell funding and pay for some private input (I think they will pay about £3000 to get started). Yo can then use this to train yourselves and the nursery to implement interventions (could be ABA or other approaches). ABA can be expensive but we managed with 2 hours supervision a week (£100) by using DLA and family contributions until Tribunal. There are other charities (see ABA4ALL Facebook page)

Cerebra used to offer grants for private SLT of about £500.

PEACH and Ambitious About Autism run intro to ABA courses for parents

My advice would be to train yourself. We wasted several months waiting for the services to come in and then were profoundly disappointed when they did! They were not worth waiting for.

Sorry to be so pessimistic but I wish someone had told me not to wait.

I would apply for EHCP now. You probably will be turned down first time but often back down when you appeal and something like 97% of appeals for an assessment are successful. You do not need a diagnosis to apply.

[2boysnamedR]

Gosh so hard to advise as everything has gone wrong for us!

Looking back here's some ideas.

Don't expect any external help will come along and help to the extent you don't still need help iykwim. I have wasted countless years waiting for worse than useless SLT

If you can get a private SLT report. I got one for £140. Worth it as then you have a proper baseline to work from. Start gathering that evidence

Get the school to call in early years. Get them to call in the early intervention bods from the la (name escapes me - early something?)

You need to get the nursery to get you this much needed evidence. Email them or meet with a list of concerns. Get agreement on the concerns. Get Ieps started with targets. That's all evidence.

Shame as I guess you only have three months left till school?

You can apply for ehcp. Much better if the nursery do it for you.

Are you under a paed? Ot? Slt?

I appealed for a statement. Appealing takes ages. In a ideal world you want pre school / school to apply. La are more likely to give a ehcp if the request isn't from you.

However if it has to be you then people do win them

Sorry if that's muddled, about to collect from nursery

[2boysnamedR]

La person is the improvement advisor. Just looked it up. Every nursery will have one. They go in and tell the nursery what they need to do.

Then you get some at gets to work at. If the targets help that's great - good evidence she will need this for school.

If they don't that's good evidence she needs more

[AgnesDiPesto]

Here EHCP request from nursery would be turned down as quickly as one by a parent on basis they expect you to do 1-2 years of their useless interventions and prove they don't work first. I prefer to apply myself and have control of the process on basis here most first requests are refused anyway and you are forced to appeal (but then they often give in immediately).

[2boysnamedR]

My la is one of the worse but I see better results when parents don't step in. It's taken since 2012 of appealing and I still have another appeal to go. It would have been cheaper and quicker to let my ds fail for 1-2 years. But there's the huge risk that after years of failure you still have years of appeals to do as well

[BrilliantineMortality]

Thanks so much for your advice. Seems as though we're going to have our work cut out. I agree that educating ourselves must be the way forward. We're just so drained and dog-tired at the moment and it's difficult to find time to research what we need to do.

[Banananutella]

Try contacting Ipsea - helpful info on the website and also you can ring their specialist advisors