DS4 is 8, nearly 9 in year 4 at school. He has his ehcp up for review soon (I need to chase that up). He has moderate learning difficulties, physical development delay, hearing loss (wears hearing aids), some health issues and some dyspraxia traits.
He gets a lot of help at school most of the time although sometimes he loses his support because the extra SN TA's (he shares one with a few different children) have to cover staff absence due to covid.
He learnt to write his name at the beginning of year 3 and he is about 2-3 years behind the average child in maths I think. His reading is quite good (level 9 on oxford reading tree) but his handwriting isn't really legible and he struggles a lot with spelling. He also struggles with speech and being understood. The gap between him and the other children in his class keeps getting bigger and some of the other children make fun of him because of that.
We have been doing activities with our local special needs groups over Easter and he has really thrived. It was so lovely for him to be around other children with additional needs.
I've been looking at the criteria for special needs schools in my area and they all say on their website that only 2% of children with SEN need to be in special needs school and it's just for children with very complex special needs or extreme behaviour who can't cope in mainstream school. That doesn't sound much like my ds to be honest.
I don't know where is the right place for him to be at school. I've talked to the staff at our local catchment secondary and he will probably be close to the limit of additional needs that they can cope with but they seem happy to take him when the time comes. The children at the groups we went to were mostly in mainstream school too but scattered all over the county. I'm confused about where he is meant to go as it doesn't sound like he would fit in at either special needs or mainstream school.