I'm a Teacher in a Pupil Referral Unit. Ama

[teachandsleep]

Ask me anything. Work with Secondary age children

Lemonsquinky
Apply for a job at one, a friend of mine just has. Presuming you’re a qualified teacher.

Everything that BothALarkAndAnOwl says .
My son was diagnosed with ADHD and high functioning ASD by CAMHS almost 2 years ago when he was coming to the end of Year 5 .
The attitude of the OP regarding the misdiagnosis of ADHD/ASD is sadly common amongst so-called professionals who should know better . As is the old chestnut of 'parents only push for a diagnosis to get DLA' .
It took a suicide attempt from my child , in school , for the assessment process to accelerate .
My son actually received outreach support from the local PRU and their report actually helped towards getting his diagnosis as the TA was trained in supporting ASD/ADHD children and wrote that she believed our son was on the ASD spectrum.
What would I like to ask the OP ? Could you please stop spouting out ignorant comments , stop re-inforcing negative stereotypes and please do some ASD/ADHD training .

Do the kids in your school attain exam success?

Our local one didn't present anyone for exams last year at all. It is perceived to be a borstal-by-another-name, just a holding bay til the kids are 16 and can get on with the inevitable justice system involvement they are, apparently, destined for.

It makes me sad, some of those kids have had horrific home lives, a tuned in teacher could have amazing impact on them.

The ignorance around ASD and ADHD is astounding OP and your attitude is awful. Please source some training around ASD and ADHD and address your attitude. It's teachers like you who make the lives of parents of children with conditions diagnosed by a team of medical professionals so much more difficult.

What percentage of children you work with have experienced trauma as a child. Anything from abuse, neglect, multiple bereavements, parental mental illness, alcohol/drug use?

Sorry I've just RTFT... seems to me that a failure to support and treat kids with trauma is a big factor in their behaviour...

The op said in her experience some children are misdiagnosed and their issues can be due to parenting rather than a medical condition. That's her experience it's not a personal I sukt to people who do have a child with a medical condition. It's her experience. She's not saying if your child has a condition it's actually due to parenting.
Stop seeing perceived insults and slights where there are none.

Wtf. The OP didn't say ASD was misdiagnosed - she specifically said they don't have kids with ASD in their unit. Also, I can't see where she said all ADHD is misdiagnosed. Just because your dc genuinely have ADHD, that doesn't mean that there aren't kids who are misdiagnosed.

But what gives any teacher the right, the knowledge or the experience to suggest misdiagnosis when diagnosis only comes (sometimes after many years) following rigorous assessment by a team of medical professionals who have studied far longer and at a higher level and have relevant the qualifications to their field?

Maybe look up professional gaslighting OP if you think there are 90% of anything misdiagnosed. It suggests that you don't understand something rather than there being in fact such high misdiagnosis.

Medical professionals of all kinds misdiagnose things quite often, regardless of their qualifications. I can't comment on the OP's right to make such assumptions, as I don't know what her qualifications or knowledge are like. She may have tons of experience of working with kids with ADHD though, and presumably being with them day-in day-out would give you a perspective that medical professionals wouldn't have.

I've taught quite a lot of kids with ADHD (and ASD) but as a regular secondary school subject teacher, I certainly don't have the knowledge or experience to judge misdiagnosis. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen or that very experienced non-medical professionals can't sometimes spot it.

Op didn't say 90% misdiagnosed, but that in 90% of cases the problem is parenting or trauma.
I still find this concerning because I am willing to bet a high proportion of them will have undiagnosed SEN. Bearing in mind how long it takes to get a diagnosis, how much you sometimes have to push for assessment, the readiness of some ignorant people to assume anything they are observing in your kid that is out of the norm is the result of poor parenting...

How I remember the 'helpful' parenting advice given to us by professionals who immediately jumped to the conclusion that we must be getting basic stuff wrong. Even though we were somehow doing it right with our other kids.

I've had a school SENCo question dd's ASD diagnosis, even though she was diagnosed at two years old because of the severity and I didn't push at all. Her reason for questioning? Dd is very polite and never misbehaves ever. So fundamentally SENCo questioning a diagnosis based on her ignorance and knowledge of stereotypes rather than any real understanding.

The parenting assertion is tricky - if you consider the fact that a lot of those parent have spent up to sixteen years trying to deal with a child with undiagnosed need then there’s a good chance they might seem more stretched, stressed and their home lives more chaotic than other people’s - they may have had to sacrifice their job to care for their high needs child and consequently, things begin to unravel. This ‘us and them’ attitude to families is common but it can happen to anyone in the wrong circumstances.

Absolutely JamesBoredom - I did have to sacrifice my much-loved job to support my child (long periods of school refusal, exclusions, multiple appointments etc). Fortunately I have a high-earning spouse so we weren’t at risk of stumbling onto the breadline. But it certainly happens to others. And the strain on my marriage has been immense.

As for misdiagnosis, we chose not to pursue a private diagnosis because (1) a proper multi-disciplinary assessment is not cheap and, high-earning spouse or not, was a stretch too far when i’d had to give up work especially as (2) the risk of coming up against the “well, of course you have a diagnosis; you paid for it” seemed so great and our LEA has a reputation for pushing back hard against them. Although I’m sure OP and others are right and misdiagnoses do happen, as a parent you’d have to be pretty bloody determined, wealthy or both to jump through all the many hoops (parenting courses, crisis calls to CAMHS, assessments, failures to reach threshold, exclusions, suicide attempts, homes being trashed etc) that seems to be a prerequisite for NHS assessment. And to do it all for DLA? Laughable.

So, there may be no children with ASC (or ADHD?) in Op’s PRU but I do wonder how many are sitting there, undiagnosed, while their exhausted, skint parents wonder just how their family could have been let down so badly.

And I agree wholeheartedly with Bitchinabonnet’s last remark. I feel very fortunate that my child currently has a teacher who has gone out of her way to read up on both ASC and ADHD - and this at a school where, to quote another child, “they get rid of the naughty children”. (Sometimes they go to lower-performing local primaries, one or two with ASC diagnoses go to special schools but some just end up at home, allegedly being home educated or waiting for the LEA to find them “suitable provision”.) Reports of a crisis in SEN management and diagnosis are, if anything, vastly under-reported and the effects under-appreciated.

What Lark said.

My dd recently got an ASD diagnosis at 14. Plenty of people query it, even close family members.

It took years to get CAMHS to listen to her and I. It's a shitty process. And yes her issues were initially blamed on my parenting. As my ds' severe illness has been blamed on my mental health. The reality is not enough CAMHS resources, SEN support and family support. Much easier to blame mum

parenting lacks because you often have an undiagnosed adhd parent or parent with undiagnosed ASD, and executive function issues, struggling to keep their shit together parenting a kid with similar issues.

All 3 of mine are autistic and so am I. I have spent far too much time fending off people who assume its because im a shit parent, or dont wallop them enough etc. So tedious and cliché

Quite often what is mistaken as poor parenting is in fact a parent responding to the needs of a child who may or may not be diagnosed with ASD or and a co morbid. Lorna Wing a respected authority on ASD commented that what is seen as different parenting being judged as a cause for a child's difficulties should more often be seen a a child's difficulties needing a different sort of parenting and a parent responding to those needs.

People always assume that it starts with poor parenting and impacts the kid. It’s so often the other way around. It can start with a complex and high level of need that’s often unmanageable and that in turn impacts the parent.

Just for clarity - you don't need a diagnosis to get DLA and a diagnosis does not mean you would automatically get DLA

To be fair to PRUs the one my child nearly went to said he had suspected asd and therefore was the wrong setting and the LA did something else instead. So perhaps ops unit really doesnt take people with asd

The chances are that OP's provision has a significant number of undiagnosed autistic kids...

DLA is based on need not diagnosis.

TBH these threads are usually started by posters using a front as a way to say a load of disablist crap.