To ask what's the law or policy on wrap around care?

[drspouse]

My DS is in a short stay school which is handily quite near our house and he goes to a CM twice a week but he can't stay there for ever, and we are only being offered far distant schools that involve a taxi ride and have no after school care or extracurricular activities "because of the taxis".
There is a local MLD school that has after school care but it's not suitable for him.
I work 0.6 and a colleague just asked to go to 0.5 and was refused. I'm the higher earner but DH is a KW who trains other KWs and he can't drop to school hours either because lots of his training is day long or has to cover a choice of hours (and he's likely to have a day a week in the office, an hour away).
Is there any legal obligation to provide after school care or consider this in placement?
Or does the government just not want my taxes and DH benefit to society?

The problem is, what you want doesn't exist. So you can spend your life being dissatisfied and chasing unicorns or you can look at what is actually available and make the best of that.

SEN provision in this country is atrocious in many ways and unfortunately the way the legislation is written leads many parents to think that they have certain entitlements which although they may exist on a technical level don't actually exist in reality.

If the type of provision your child needs is not available in the vicinity of where you live then it cannot just be conjured out of nowhere. So whatever is put in place will involve compromises.

It's all so unfair. The fight is so hard and so exhausting not to mention financially crippling. I would say though that if they are prepared to pay for independent specialist then they should be prepared to spend a significant chunk to keep him in mainstream if that is your wish. But if they name the school you don't want then Tribunal is your only option.

you can spend your life being dissatisfied and chasing unicorns or you can look at what is actually available and make the best of that.
It's really hard to make the best of something that you think is going to harm your child..

If you can get the taxi to drop off at your CM even at none childminder days, and just pick your ds up from there, that might be your best work around.

Not all SN schools are suitable and many LAs work on a bums on seats attitude eg if they'll take them, job done.

My ds ended up in a 'temporary' ARP unit placement. He has ASD but many of the children there had a range of very violent and explosive behaviours which he found distressing (not to mention the language). He was there for years because the offers from the LA weren't suitable.

The day was shorter 9-3 so about 30 minutes shorter than the mainstream school and half days on Friday. So anyone who has a job that worked around school hours might struggle.

It is very hard to find out of school care or childminders who will take children with SNs.

While it is always the parents responsibility to find childcare, it harms no-one to acknowledge that it is a much tougher ask if a child has SN.

Unsurprisingly I've had to give up work and now home school my ds as there wasn't any other option.

While I don't think LAs set out to force parents of SN children to shoulder so much that mainstream parents rarely have to deal with, I don't think they are too bothered either.

I'm saving my LA between £25-35k a year by 'opting out'

@drspouse

you can spend your life being dissatisfied and chasing unicorns or you can look at what is actually available and make the best of that. It's really hard to make the best of something that you think is going to harm your child..

I can see that but unless you come up with an actual viable alternative i am not sure what you are hoping to achieve. This thread started because you didn't think you or your husband should compromise your work lives to facilitate your child's school placement, that's very very different from saying the placement will actively harm your child.

And many many children in BSED settings find the behaviour of others distressing while exhibiting those behaviours themselves, unless they are are all educated individually (which wouldn't fulfil your expressed desire for your son to have opportunities for social interaction) they will experience the behaviours of others.

It seems that you don't want your child to experience distressing behaviours from others but do want him in a mainstream despite the fact that he exhibits distressing behaviours - so in short you want other children to be exposed to something you think your child should not be exposed to. Can you see how that is not really a viable solution and will explain why mainstream schools are not will ing to offer a placement likely because of the impact on the rest of the cohort.

There is no legal requirement for schools to provide or organise or facilitate after school care.

He's going to exhibit many more distressing behaviour if distressed. He also never swore, made death threats or was sexist before going to a specialist setting.

Where do you live OP? It sounds tiny. I think you need to move to a bigger city if you want more choice of better schools, aftershool care etc

Why have all the mainstream schools said no?

I really am sorry, I have not read all the threads, so i may be reiterating what others have said.

We experienced issues with transport when my eldest son was at school. I am not sure is your son is transitioning e.g. from primary to secondary, or if there has been a breakdown in his current placement (which was the case with us), but in either situation, an extraordinary review of your sons' EHCP (Education Health and Care Plan) should take place and after school provision should be considered as part of his support needs (the agencies and LA (local authority) will consider who will pay for this).

My son transferred to a more specialised school when his placement broke down and the LA paid for his transport (taxi) which was 30 miles each way. We hoped that my son would start as a day pupil at the school and then progress to a weekly boarder. Weekly boarding would have been excellent for my son because he could benefit from a range of extra curricula activities and develop his social skills.

I am assuming your son has an EHCP and I would advise you to request a review to discuss his needs.

@LaLaLand888

Where do you live OP? It sounds tiny. I think you need to move to a bigger city if you want more choice of better schools, aftershool care etc

It's not that my town is tiny, it's the LEA that is crap. Huge county, one SEMH resource base because all the other schools saw what was on offer by the LEA and ran away fast. So they are basically wasting our tax money on specialist independent rather than fund schools properly.

@cansu at least 3 mainstream schools have said no on the grounds they don't have space for him to work outside the classroom most of the time (his original primary school was one of these). Which we think is crazy.

We haven't had the details from the most recent one.

Does he need to work outside the classroom all the time? My dd was like this towards the end of her time at mainstream. I was very wedded to mainstream but eventually it was clear that she was actually isolated from her peers anyway. She was essentially being educated in a corridor by a TA. Her experience as independent specialist has been amazing. I appreciate though that this is an ASD provision and not SEMH. What is it about the specialist provision that you are against?

As I've posted up thread, he is doing this all the time in the SSS, so this would not be an advantage in specialist.
I've posted several things we don't like about specialist and that would be missing but he'd get in mainstream.

What is the SSS?

I am sorry if I have misunderstood. Is he currently in mainstream? Is he happy where he is? Are you having to move because the school he is at don't want to continue with him?

"least 3 mainstream schools have said no on the grounds they don't have space for him to work outside the classroom most of the time (his original primary school was one of these). Which we think is crazy."

Having a separate space to work in for long periods of time is going to be an issue in most schools. Someone I know did get this in a mainstream (with resource base) but the alternative was an independent special costing well over a £100k with transport. Even then it was done with the aim that they would eventually spend a lot of time with other children.

Sorry just seen the Short Stay School. I read your original OP last night so had forgotten that bit. Is he outside the classroom at the short stay school? If this is a kind of a PRU then no doubt they are operating like the specialist would with small classes and a more individualised approach. If this is true then what you miss will be the breadth of the curriculum and peers that do not have his problems. What you might gain is an environment where he is valued for who he is and where people will be more patient and will try and help him manage his feelings and behaviour. I may be completely off base, but I did find personally that accepting my dd would not 'fit' in mainstream was very beneficial to her. She loved the other children at her mainstream and still talks about two of them. She likes to drive past the school etc etc. However, they really couldn't meet her needs and her behaviour was getting worse there. Since she has been at the specialist school her behaviour, language and emotional well being has been significantly improved. It does come with challenges as I said upthread about wrap around care. She starts later one morning so I had to change my hours and we pay for help after school etc etc, but we use her DLA to pay for this. The other major advantage of the specialist school is I do not have to keep communicating with the school about problems.

Working outside the classroom most of the time is something that most mainstream schools would struggle with I think. It means they have to have a teaching assistant doing the teaching which is far from ideal and it means they aren’t accessing the majority of the curriculum.

Ds has in the past spent a lot of time working outside the classroom but with the aim of building so he now spends the whole day in the classroom most of the time. He does have a workstation in the classroom which he uses a lot of the time but he is still part of the class.

That is the aim but the SSS has pushed "he won't be in the classroom, he'd be better in the specialist school where he will be in the classroom" and are now denying he's afraid of his peers but claiming to be baffled as to why he won't go in the classroom and refusing to believe he's coming home saying X says he wishes DS was dead and Y has punched him (both these things happened but not on the day that DS said them).

I have absolutely no confidence that he will be any happier with the same group of children (in some cases the exact same children) at a specialist school.

And yes, the aim is to build up to working in the classroom and he was managing this at his first school.

What are the issues when he is in the classroom? How much time is he able to be in class? When he is in class, is he able to do the work? Surely the proof will be in how the new school manages the behaviour of the students? It may be that they manage them much better than in his current placement.

If the primary school was going well, how did he end up at the short stay school?

It all sounds very hard OP, and it shouldn’t be so hard :( Sadly though you won’t be able to change a crap LEA in the short term, and I think if you’ve already gone down the tribunal route the likelihood is that there just isn’t the provision that you need in your area.

Have you looked at moving areas to somewhere with better provision? It sounds extreme but might be worth the upheaval if it meant you could secure something suitable for your son - he still has a lot of education years left.

@cansu

If the primary school was going well, how did he end up at the short stay school?

His first school wasn't going well enough for them - he kept refusing to do tasks, they were convinced he had MLD, we knew he didn't but was just escalating himself to time out every day because of their behaviour charts. They said "we don't have room for him to be out of the classroom even part of the day in Y3, he needs specialist", we said "we hate all the specialist schools, he will be terrified", they said "maybe he'd do OK at a small mainstream" which we ran with but the small mainstream then had 5 TAs a week, restrained him all the time, didn't adapt things for him or consider that JUST MAYBE telling me the night before about a special day that I had no idea what it was about wasn't going to help him. Then he went to the SSS, then we had COVID and he was in school part time with just him and one other, and he got used to that, and then he said things like "X wishes I would die" and "Y punched me" and "I hate Mummy and I wish she would die and girls are useless and can't play football or do gaming" and "if I go into class I'm going to hurt them all" and school won't take the first three seriously but take the last one seriously.

I'm no expert but it doesn't really sound like it was going well. I am going to be blunt - no mainstream will accept a child who needs to spend the vast majority of their time out of class. If he is also refusing to complete tasks and needs to be restrained then this is doubly the case. You would be better off accepting and working with the EBD school. Yes, his peers will say inappropriate things as they themselves have difficulties. I am guessing that your son's peers at mainstream would say that your son said inappropriate things too. I think you need to look at the situation not as you would like it to be but as what is the best you could make it. Is there a specialist school that you prefer elsewhere? I ended up making my peace with the idea that mainstream would not fit my dd. I have never seen mainstream work where the child is unable to access the classroom.