11 year old DS, severe separation anxiety and secondary school struggles - suggestions for alternative London schools?

Just by way of update, we are well into the first week at Minerva and are extremely impressed. Staff and kids lovely. About 60% of the students are neurodiverse. Work at a good and adaptable level. Highly flexible. Good example is in the live lessons - depending on where your kid is comfortable they can contribute orally, by public chat, or by private chat. They can have cameras on, off, on but showing the ceiling, on but with them blurred out etc. There are social groups but no pressure to join. You can adapt the work to do it when works best for your kid etc. Very up on autism, ADHD, anxiety etc and teachers are all very conscious of trying to work with kids to help them feel ok. Technical systems are well thought through and up-to-date. Lots of use of good tech, particularly in terms of assistive tech to help kids with dyslexia etc or other challenges. 1-1- mentor is amazing. Highly recommended if anyone is thinking about it. DS is getting more and more confident, and his anxiety levels have dropped massively. I think a big part of it is so much more of his day is now in his control. He gets to decide if he feels happy answering a question. When one class went to do group work, the teacher said anyone who was not comfortable with group work in breakout rooms could stay with her and do it there. I could see DS breathe a sigh of relief....

Thanks - yes, I was planning to attend that webinar. Her viewpoint makes a lot of sense

Thanks - that would be ideal, but at the moment he finds the whole idea of interacting with other kids completely overwhelming and terrifying so we can’t even try. He says he just doesn’t understand them and finds his peers confusing and unpredictable and often mean, which makes interacting with them extremely stressful and scary. Part of what we are learning about the extreme empathy which comes with his autism is, for example, every time one of the boys in his class said something mean to one of the girls, he felt it deeply. Every time he saw someone being told off, or being bullied, or being sad because they got a bad grade, or saw children dying on the news, it hurt him and he fears a world which often treats people as cruelly as ours does…

But we are thinking of hopefully trying to join some sort of group things in the future when he has recovered from the autistic burnout a bit. Maybe some sort of group classes or other things. Hopefully we can help him learn that there are good people out there too, and that he can find his tribe if we give it time

Also - just to add - looking back at some of my posts when he was “improving” at his old school, he has explained that he thought everyone found school that painful and terrifying and he had to put on a brave face and pretend (I.e mask!) and there was something wrong with him because he struggled to do so. But once he learnt that he was autistic and everyone else did not have the challenges he did, he could drop the mask and let us know how he really felt every day. How what we saw was a kid not crying before school, or when he spoke to me on the phone, and assumed that meant he was getting more comfortable and the “resilience” building was slowly working, whereas in reality he was just repressing how he was feeling and acting happier because he thought he had to. All while he was secretly scratching and biting and pinching himself in fear and stress, or lying in bed alone every night trying not to cry about the next day…

I know now if we had not pulled him out and made a change, in a few months or years he would have had a complete breakdown and we would have been in a very very bad place. Hopefully now we have changed things in time. It is still going to take a long time to build his strength and confidence up, but I am hopeful we will get there.

Another brief update - online school is going really well, but the hybrid structure of trying to get him in to real school on one or two days a week is not. His level of anxiety and stress about those days is extreme, and we have not managed to get him into a classroom for more than 10min. He finds the other kids, and the school environment, absolutely terrifying. Even though there are only 5 kids in his class. Even though it is a small and nurturing school. Crying in fear the night before going in, even knowing it would only be for 10min. Shaking in terror as we approach the school building…

So we are going to give up. What is the point in forcing him in when everything has showed us so far that does nothing but traumatise him? If online school works, and is what he needs right now, then I guess we have to accept that and let him be at home. We have tried CBT, tried “resilience” building for a year of forcing him in every day, tried baby steps in a new school, and nothing has worked. But online he is doing the work, answering questions in class, engaging with the learning…so I guess we have no choice but to have him learning from home every day and hope we can work on the socialising side of things in the future when he has more capacity…I feel like crying but it is what it is and I don’t see we have any other options.

@Ilovechoc12 @TheOutlaws Thanks both. It is fascinating for me to read this thread back now. I think, like many people, I really did not understand what autism was, particularly the less "typical" ways it can present (it was reading something from the Autistic Girls Network in particular which was a lightbulb moment for me). My spectrum comments upthread make we wince now I have actually done some reading on the subject...In my defence, I was also being thoroughly gaslit by his therapist, who basically told me, when I raised possible autism concerns back in February, that that was just my catastophising anxiety playing up, and I was wrong. That fact that she knew nothing about ASC, and was fleecing us for huge amounts of money per session where she was doing very little, didnt help either.

Since we got the diagnosis, and learnt more about it, it is as obvious to us as it was to some people in this thread....The fact that we just got his new school uniform, he tried on the sport polo and immediately started crying because it was so painfully itchy, says it all really. And now we know to email the school immediately and to find alternatives, rather that telling him to suck it up....

We worry, of course, about being at home all day 4 days a week. Not least because there is a side of him that is getting a bit misanthropic (other people suck etc) and agoraphobic (I think he would just sit on his bed inventing new pokemon creatures all day if he could), which might not be helped by that set-up. But ultimately, last year was traumatic for him, and he needs time to get himself together and rebuild. To be fair to him, I think most people suck too...

Monday will be interesting for us all, and I am sure there will be a fair bit of anxiety about the new school, new teachers etc, not least because so much is unknown and uncertain, but hopefully after a couple of weeks we will get into the new routine.

@Zib Thanks - we ended up pulling him from his school at the last minute just before term started, as they unfortunately really just did not seem to get it. Lots of "well in the real world he will have to learn to deal with xyz so we need to make him do it etc", which is just stupid. We also received advice from a number of autism specialists that his particular profile (which means he gets very overwhelmed on a sensory basis, to the extent it is physically painful for him, for example) meant that a big, noisy secondary would never work and there was real danger of his mental health declining rapidly. He had started scratching and pinching himself and we were seeing a lot of scary signs of wider anxiety and trauma, so needed to act fast. We are starting at a hybrid school next week where he will be in one or two days a week and at home the rest doing online lessons, in small classes and in a much smaller school which has a lot of experience dealing with ND kids. We still have a long way to go, and he is still really anxious about starting at his new school on Monday, but hopefully it will be for the best.