Getting the best education for my gifted ASD kid

[unlimiteddilutingjuice]

Hi, I hope someone can help. I'm really at loss for what to do for the best.

DS has ASD. Mainstream primary school placement broke down. Then we home educated for a few years. I put him back into school for secondary, in a SEN unit within a mainstream school.

From a pastural care point of view they are amazing. He's come on leaps and bounds in terms of social skills and confidence. To the extent that he's maybe outgrown the unit a little bit.

I'm in the process of getting him diagnosed with ADHD which includes a cognitive test. I don't have the scores yet, but from the reaction of the ed psych, it looks like his IQ is going to come back really high.
So now I'm feeling some serious Mum guilt for putting a gifted kid in a SEN unit.

He's 13, but they have him working at literacy and numeracy at an end of primary type level. In the cognitive test he just sat, he was confidently answering questions intended for 17 year olds.

There's some dysgraphia in the mix but he can express himself adequately by typing and using apps like MathsMod. With reasonable adjustments he could certainly handle harder work. When we were home educating, he was able to follow his own interests and there was some serious geeking out over the humanities. He loves history, philosophy, RE, Geography.

I'm fairly up on the law (we're in Scotland so its slightly different). I know the school should be meeting all his educational needs. Including his giftedness as well as his disabilities. I just don't know how this would look in practice. Or what, in particular, I should ask for the school to be doing.

Apart from the SEN unit its a bog standard comp with fairly low expectations for young people's attainment.

Bloody hell. Just had an appointment with the ed psych, to answer some questions on his development.
Ed psych will give me the full report in an appointment next week.
But, in the meantime, she was able to tell me a few things about his WISC score.

He is average for:

Visual Spatial Index
Fluid Reasoning Index
Working Memory Index

He is below average for processing speed

He scored 150 on the Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI). Three standard deviations above the mean.

Honestly, I'm kind of in shock.

The Ed psych was very skeptical that an ASL (additional support for learning) unit can meet his needs. He needs subject specialists apparently.

Another thing she recommended was skipping NAT5's (Scottish Equivalent of GCSE's) and going straight to Highers. But at a slower pace to allow for his processing speed.

DS's school is a bog standard comp in a rough area. They don't get a lot of kids through their Highers from mainstream. Never mind the ASL unit. Never mind early and without NAT5's.

What on earth to do now?

Oh...and he almost certainly has ADHD as well.

Hi OP. I what way would you say he is gifted? What was his FSIQ score?

Can you continue to home educate - playing to his interests and strengths. Adding in suitable extra and super curricular activities that he would like and for social contact.
What you have found out is positive for him and it’s specific so now you know more.
It’s also not unusual for kids to have a spikey profile - both of my DC do.

I don't have the FSIQ scale yet. There's a meeting coming up with the Ed psych soon where she'll go through it all with me.

Ed psych did say that his score on the verbal comprehension portion of the IQ test was 150 which is three standard deviations above the mean.

It's likely his FSIQ will be considerably lower because he was only average in other areas and has low processing speed.

Unfortunately I don't think I can home educate him anymore.

It was great while it lasted but I was struggling to find suitable activities as he reached secondary age.

I thought it would make sense for him to get a bit more independence and socialisation so I registered him with a school.

I was concerned that he'd been put of school for some time and had ASD so I pushed for that to be a unit within a mainstream school.

Now life has moved on. I'm in full time work.

Plus it's been really good for him in some ways. He's got some nice friends. He's learned to cook in home ec.

I think it would be a backwards step to remove him again.

I'm not in the UK so the way gifted education works is definitely different over here. Ie, we don't just say "all kids are gifted at something" but instead acknowledge that some kids are unusually intelligent and that after a certain point, it starts to cause problems. My DC is in primary right now - school seems to think they can meet her needs but I am pretty skeptical. Right now she is enjoying it socially but the teacher shared the gap between her and the next child on the recent assessments was very large so my concern is longer term, how is she going to stay engaged. If your DC is engaged at school, then exploring his interests outside of it might be enough.

Where we are, there is a state option that kids test into but it's more achievement based rather than IQ based, and it feels like for us, the challenges are related to DC's brain just being wired differently, whereas the majority of kids in the program will be in the 95th percentile, not the 99+. That said, all of the parents I talked to who moved their kids there said it was not perfect but way better than Gen Ed.

The Davidson Institute is a great place for information on parenting gifted kids.

My DC is not 2E but had a VCI score even higher than your DCs (she ran out the test in both subtests, so would need a test normed to an older age to get a true understanding of how high) but the rest of her scores were also in the superior/very superior rage and her FSIQ was over 140 so possibly more different than your DC in some ways but without the AuADHD in the mix.