The stories people are telling about schools and abuse/anxiety etc. seem to me to be ones that should end with "and then we took the school to court and the LEA settled and found them a place in a fabulous new school and the teacher was fired" not "and then we gave up on school". The same is true of my teen relative (without the court bit).
How can they provide a setting calm and non-stimulating enough for him to learn? What would suing achieve?
I studied law at Cambridge. DS has barrister godparents. We wouldn't need to pay lawyers. The problem is, you can't magic a school that can manage a child who is both gifted and autistic out of thin air, and those that do exist can't magic free spaces out of thin air, either. Funding is the problem - our LEA head of SEN provision phoned me up when DS left his first school (he's on the waiting list for the third, now...) and he himself has an autistic child. It isn't as if people work in that area because they want to cause suffering for disabled kids and their parents, after all. There just is not any money. Most schools now don't provide support unless a child is failing to hit targets. Mine was hitting the top possible targets in scaled score terms for his KS1 SATS.His misery wasn't scaleable, and nor was the clear statement from his OT assessment that he could not possibly be achieving his potential when taught in a large class. We didn't even know what his potential was until he left school because the energy and effort he had to spend in masking, and in coping, absorbed so much of his energy, and when the school see a child working a couple of years ahead of age expectations for reading and maths, they think all is tickety boo - and really, can you blame them? Teachers are grossly overworked and they see a kid with educated parents, from a loving home, with what look to them like mild special needs with the mum just sharp-elbowed. How can they justify pouring funding from a tiny budget, when they have kids also with additional needs who can't read or write and desperately need intensive help?
The story shouldn't end with my suing them. The story should never start, because they should have properly qualified SENDCOs without other teaching responsibilities in every class, and classes should be of 15 kids. They manage in Scandinavian countries - they just spend a shitload more.
I could have spent around ten grand on assessments for DS, only to have the same problems in a new school, but with his having a one to one TA whom he might click with, or might not. Bluntly, my mum has a PhD, my husband 3 degrees and 4 A levels in STEM subjects, and I have 5 arts A levels and 2 law degrees. Between us, we can't always manage to answer DS's answers. I have to defer to DH on things about whether the expansion of the sun and consequent cooling would mean equal levels of heat because a larger sun, though cooler, might be able to heat a larger area. And energy is transformed but never destroyed. I haven't done any science since 1990, and it was GCSE at that. I have no bloody clue. And he's 8. I'm sorry, but do you honestly think a school can meet that need on the one hand, and his inability to wipe his own bum on the other? Especially when he won't poo at school because he is too ashamed for them to know that, so he would leave doubled over in pain at home time.
I appreciate that most people don't understand what it is like to have a child with additional needs. That's entirely understandable because nor did I, despite a sibling who does. Half my family have no clue, because my son is charming, loving, warm, gifted and kind. He's nobody's idea of classic autism. But his needs are actually quite massive, and the fact the DLA - notoriously suspicious of claims, and swift to reject - awarded him highest rate of care at first application, with it expiring the day before he turns 16 and stops being eligible, gives you some clue on what life is like. He needs private school levels of class size, and to be taught without being pushed, while still having his (apparently already at A level) critical thinking skills developed. I struggle, and I'm his mum. His qualified one to one primary teacher, with SENDCO training, does too. I just don't think people have the least clue about the state of special needs education funding in this country right now - let alone about the wholesale removal of provision for gifted children.
I find home ed a royal PITA. I adore my son. He's amazing. But it is HARD, teaching him. I'm not good at it and he is so resistant to formal learning that I have to hand over the grammar and maths to a qualified teacher, and do what I can via stealth - we have literally a thousand books on all subjects (Lord bless the Book People, and anyone who ever donates kids' books in good nick to charity shops) and I manage to engage his interest in various topics by seemingly innocent chats, and then oh look, we happen to have a book on renewable energy/the Roman Empire/geological layers found after volcanoes... and it's such a constant effort. But what choice is there?
There is no magic wand, no perfect school properly funded. The best there is is a school who care, who get it, and who allow another ASD kid to chew gum in class, too, instead of (as happened at DS's better school) telling him that they know he only needs to chew when stressed, and they know he loves school, so has no need to.
I would love to send my son to a fabulous school. If suing would achieve it, I would in a shot. But what's the point? When the only state school that could work has no place, and the state is not about to acknowledge that otherwise, no provision but private could work?
I do think a lot of people have a touching faith in what the law can achieve. You see it on here over child residence and contact fights all the time - "go to court!" as though that will wave a magic wand. And "call the police!" as though they can always, or even often, do anything. The law can only enforce what is there to be accessed. It can't create new provision.