Autistic son and handwriting

[Holymolymackerel]

Evening all,
My son 6 is very anxious about writing. Its affecting all aspects of school. He is having meltdowns about it.
The problem is the teacher is expecting him to produce the same amount of work as the other children and he is losing parts of his lunchtime to catch up.
When he does write I cant read it, it's not on the lines, uneveningly spaced, strange letter formation etc.
I help in class as a volunteer so I see how upset he gets. Lip wobbling, looking so sad. Teacher has started to say that he's not going to pass his sats in anything including mental arithmetic which he is really good at, because of the writing.
Any advice about what i should expect school to do? How to tackle this please?

My DS is Autistic and Dyspraxic and his hand writing was really poor at that age (he's 17 now it's made some improvement but he mainly types everything). He would master the spaces between words but couldn't remember the punctuation at the same time or he'd remember the capital letters but not the spaces between words. His teacher was very encouraging though and said, that once she'd got her eye in and could read it, the content was very good and that's all she was concerned about.

As others have said, you need to talk to the SENCO before his confidence is damaged and that starts to impact on other things. Has he got an EHCP? He should be having differentiated work. Also, the teacher needs reminding that SATs are for the school and no 6 year should be pressurised about it.

jiminy the DASH is detailed assessment of speed of handwriting. They can analyse the speed and legibility of a child's handwriting. Ds had to do things like words per minute and best handwriting. I think if you score 16th percentile of less you are entitled to extra time in exams. Ds scored 24th percentile. I was never expecting him to be entitled to extra time it was more to do with his pain and resulting poor handwriting.

Like irons ds, the OT observed that he had to grip the pen much harder which was causing issues. She wrote a report with recommendations for a laptop to be used for all writing. She also advised that he should have handouts of all lessons to annotate, teachers started doing this but it doesn't happen anymore. I think if a laptop is your normal way of working you can use it for exams. I'm not sure you need a written report although Ds's school said they wanted one for evidence.

Ds has just done his year 11 mocks and used a laptop for extended writing. It did help, especially on days he had two papers withs lots of writing.