Who is unreasonable here me or the teacher?

[VelvetChairGirl]

My child is SEN he has suspected ASD and has been on a waiting list for assessment for well over half his life actually, but everyone is convinced he has Aspergers, he has a EHCP from CAMHs and the local authority have a funding package which was 14k a year for his primary to support him, I am not sure if its the same amount now he is in Secondary.

he has been struggling at school for several reasons, punitive detention system pushing him down into giving up, lack of communication/ instruction/help, inconsistency between staff over rules etc, his anxiety is thru the roof.

anyway at 9pm last night one of his teachers phoned me up to ask if there was anything wrong with him because he constantly complains of feeling sick and dizzy etc and falls asleep in class, I told her its stress he suffers from anxiety problems and has ASD.

apparently the teachers there do not know he has ASD or a EHCP they are not given such information about students and she wanted to know what could be done to help calm him, she was talking about me not the school. she wants me to contact the GP to see if they can give him anything.

she complained that she cant treat him differently because that sets a bad example to the other students, complained that he was talking to her with his eyes shut and that he is disruptive during line up and that he will have to learn to behave like the others or he will be in a lot of trouble.

she said she had to give him detention to show that he needs to change and that is the only action she can do, I told her detention doesnt work because he says he is trying and getting detentions just make him give up and despair, making his anxiety worse which leads to his behaviour getting even worse because anxiety affects him in a lot of ways, it makes him feel sick, dizzy, tired, it affects his memory and thinking, it affect his sleep and leads to more tantrums.

she says talk to the GP and that she will phone back in a couple of weeks to find out what they said to do.

So am I being unreasonable to think thats BS, he is in the care of CAMHs that school sold itself to me as having lots of SEN support, he isnt ill, he's not going to change he was born with a different brain that has difficulty navigating the world, he needs help and support, understanding and consistency, one of his biggest complaints is that the teachers all behave differently and give detention for different things so he doesnt know what he can and cant do, for example one teacher gave him a stress ball to help in class, when he took it out in another class he got detention for having it. I dont understand what she means as something to calm him, what downers? he has ASD and anxiety not hyperactivity.

I will email the GP, I'll forward the reply if she wants the GP is very used to his Anxiety problems and Hypochondria and says the same thing all the time, whats CAMHs doing about his therapy, they have never offered him meds.

You need to speak with the head teacher, and the SENCO ( if that's what it's still called )

The teacher has just declared that the school can't abide by their SEN and medical policies set out by the LEA. Go to the head. She's spouted bullshit.

I’d be straight in first thing to see the senco. What’s his ehcp like? Sometimes they’re total crap. Does it state within his ehcp he needs 1:1? I’d be pushing for reasonable adjustments. We decided on a specialist for my dd who is autistic due to fearing we’d face exactly the same issues.

Surely this is what the SENCO should be doing? Liasing with you, teachers, gp, CAMHS?

If it’s any comfort OP, I work in a secondary school and this is absolutely not the norm and is very, very wrong. That said, I’d be looking at different schools because id imagine it would take a wholesale leadership change to improve things. Is this a battle you really want to be fighting?

The school is utterly failing him at every level.

All the staff that teach him should be aware of his EHCP and he should have reasonable adjustments to help him function.

On one long-term supply job, as usual, the first thing I did was go through all the SEN records of my pupils to get up to speed. I was mortified a month later when a pupil told me that she needed coloured paper printouts to help with her dyslexia, and appologised to her. Some schools are very poor at sharing essential information that allows pupils to be supported appropriately.

In this case the severity of communication failure and staff attitude as this may well represent the staff culture rather than an individual, it may well be looking for a more appropriate school rather than constantly fighting for crumbs from them.

Email EXACTLY what she has told you to the HT and ask is this NEW school policy.

Ask for clarification on what this teacher has told you.

Ringing you at 9pm seems very odd.

I would be deeply unhappy with such an unhelpful call.

Your poor son.
It sounds very hard for you.

When was the last annual review? That should have had school involvement.

OMG. I read your title and was all set to say give the teacher some credibility, but this is awful.
Is your child Y7? I'd be moving them to a school that actually does something about SEN.
There is absolutly no way the teacher shouldn't know about his needs, and there should be allowances in place to make things less stressful for your child - and consistency in standards, a stress ball, not having to line up with everyone else are all reasonable adjustments.

SENDCO and Head of year/school are totally valid contact points to get things in place for your poor child. But I'd truly be looking at a school that can implement these things. It sounds like the current school has massive failures in this area.

That’s weird
Primary school should have sent ehcp and all relevant information to the secondary school senco.
Senco should then have had a meeting with you and your son to lay out how they will support his needs and if there’s anything they can do in your opinion to help transition.
I would ring the local authority sen department and request a copy of ehcp, then arrange meeting with senco.

I am seeing the Senco later this week anyway over other matters, if anyone has been paying any attention to my few rants on here over the last month, your know he couldn't hand in homework online for a month and was getting detention for every single one no matter how many people I talked to over it and how many I emailed (emailed 3 only 1 replied).

thats hopefully sorted now but it was a student in his year group who identified the problem not the school, we were using a parents account on the app not a child's so once I knew that I just walked straight into the reception and said I need his student login details for the app.

the inability to hand in homework and the detentions from that, made him depressed and not interested in getting in on time with him saying whats the point when he is going to get detention anyway and having detentions of 20 to 60 minutes almost every day just made everything worse.

I must say now that we have the right login so he can upload homework it has helped a bit, he is now going there on time, but still worries about detentions for things like behaviour.

and literally while writing this I got a phone call from CAMHs in answer to the email I sent last week about the school homework issues. she said the teacher was bang out of order and all teaching staff should be aware of his EHCP. she asked me to call her after my meeting with the Senco later this week and tell her how it went, make sure she said they write up an action plan about what they are going to do to fix the issues such as the teachers not knowing he is SEN. if things still dont improve we can have another meeting with them with her present and ultimately we can look into changing schools because they signed up to the provision in line with the EHCP and if they cant do that then we need to find somewhere that better supports him :D

I would ask the local authority to start contacting schools with ds ehcp, it takes up to 15 school days to get a response from a consult and you can decide when you hear back what to do.

I would also complain to the school governors.

My son has just gone into secondary, he was excluded for most of primary for 3 years and then covid hit so I was really worried.
They transitioned him by letting him explore the school, going in for lunch, then mornings, then finishing a couple of hours early working up to full time.
He has support workers with him to help. He gets a house point for contributing, being resilient, good behaviour. No negative marks as they’re concentrating on building up his confidence. His homework log in was wrong and the school apologised and eventually we were able to do it. He has a quiet room where he can watch tv during break and lunch as he gets overwhelmed and they make allowances in music and drama for him. He has a hygiene suite for any toilet issues. I am shocked beyond surprise because it’s rated the worse it can be by ofsted and with it being so much bigger than primary I was scared he’d be excluded day one!

The LA can go in and check that the school is following the ECHP. As the school has admitted they aren't and don't really want to I would go straight to the LA.

@Mymapuddlington

I would ask the local authority to start contacting schools with ds ehcp, it takes up to 15 school days to get a response from a consult and you can decide when you hear back what to do.

I would also complain to the school governors.

My son has just gone into secondary, he was excluded for most of primary for 3 years and then covid hit so I was really worried.
They transitioned him by letting him explore the school, going in for lunch, then mornings, then finishing a couple of hours early working up to full time.
He has support workers with him to help. He gets a house point for contributing, being resilient, good behaviour. No negative marks as they’re concentrating on building up his confidence. His homework log in was wrong and the school apologised and eventually we were able to do it. He has a quiet room where he can watch tv during break and lunch as he gets overwhelmed and they make allowances in music and drama for him. He has a hygiene suite for any toilet issues. I am shocked beyond surprise because it’s rated the worse it can be by ofsted and with it being so much bigger than primary I was scared he’d be excluded day one!

He had 2 half days in july and then just started normally in September, I was very surprised that no one even met him at the gates, no parents allowed in, three times I watched him walk straight in and then walk round and round in circles around the flowerbed until the caretaker (who closes the gate in the morning) directed him to the door he was meant to go thru.

He gets a mix of points for hardwork and things and detention for not having the top button of his shirt done up etc some times from the same teacher on the same day its very confusing, and theres no communication. phone them up you get an answer machine, go in and you gt told to email someone, email someone and they dont reply,
if they do phone you its always a private number.

unfortunately his fave room is the reflection room they get sent to if they are in trouble, its relaxing there he says no one talks you just sit and read a book, he has no space in this school theres nothing for him as far as I know, the previous school had a play tent he could sit in and red card system for if he was feeling stressed (he got 3 red cards a day he could hold up to show the teacher he needed a timeout in his space).

but the previous school only implemented such things after a lot of trouble, he was kicked out 7 times for threatening self harm, he ended up doing 2 days a week at a specialist centre and 3 days at the primary, they talked to each other and the specialist centre basically taught the primary sen support, he then got a dedicated teaching assistant that kind of acted like a second mum, always there at the school and available she wasn't exclusively working with him she had 4 kids to deal with, she would collect him at the gate in the morning and bring him out at the end of the day, if he was likely to kick off I would warn her in the morning he was in a bad mood, something happened etc and she would tell me at the end of the day how everything went and what homework he needs to do etc.

theres nothing at this one, I know he gets a 40 min play therapy session a week, he gets handwriting help once a week and maths help once a week which he doesnt really need except for division his math scores are very high he was top in primary for maths and tied top for reading comprehension, so I am not sure why he gets SEN maths help but other then that, he is expected to remember all his logins and homework etc nothing is told to me, he is expected to get in and find his class alone and know where to go etc, he just comes out with the other kids at the end of the day, but all the SEN help takes place during other lessons, one thing he is really struggling with is French, theres 2 french classes a week but he only attends 1 because his writing help is during the other one, he is still expected to do the same homework as those who have been to both classes and he says the teacher doesnt help him catch up she doesnt care she just teaches the whole class and tough on him if he doesnt know whats going on, that I think is also BS either help him when he is missing 50% of the lessons and is SEN anyway or just dont make him do French at all it doesnt make any sense, he got a 20 min detention for inadequate classwork in french last week because he cant spell in french.