Flexi school

[BrittaPerry]

Hiya,
How do I go about finding out if flexi school is an option for my reception aged DD? She is in a catholic school, if that is relevant (I know the funding is slightly different) Also, she has a few minor aspergers traits, I dunno if they would bring that up.
Thanks :-)

You ask the HT.

It is totally up to the HTs discretion.....

Right, so should I maybe draw up a proposed arrangement first?

Yes.

If your school does maths and literacy in the morning and everything else in the afternoon, then it'll probably work best if she goes to school either every morning or every afternoon.......

Doing 3 full days a week would work less well.

totally up to the individual school, we did it fora while with ds1 and ds2, we didnt do half days, the school prefered whole days and so did we tbh, so they generally did 2 full days a week at school, sometimes 3, i would speak to the teacher and arrange probably every half term what they thought woudl work best.

when you say it's a catholic school, do you mean it's a voluntary aided school? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_aided

this school is VA and does flexi
www.hollinsclough.staffs.sch.uk/Flexi.htm

Ask the head teacher. S/he may know nothing about FS so you will need to explain that flexi-schoolers are marked as educated off-site so their absence is not counted against school attendance. The biggest problem you are likely to face is funding: the local education authority now has the right to hold back a percentage of the money equivalent to the time that the child is out of school (although your education authority might not do this). One way to get around this is to start flexi-schooling after the annual census (ie after your child is registered as full time and the funding is set for the year) and continue up until the next census, when the school may ask you to stop for funding reasons.

DD (Y4) is flexi-schooled. She goes every morning and stays all day on Fridays. We researched it a lot and drew up a proposal and presented it to the HT who, luckily, said yes on the spot. He obviously had lots of concerns and discussed these with us but we were able to give him a satisfactory answer to all his questions. Had we gone in without doing this researched then I don't think he'd have said yes. I think what helped was printing out some info about how it works with other schools/LEAs (sort of proof that it's possible, as they will very likely know nothing about it). Make a note of the legal implications, too.

Hungrytot, is that true about the funding being affected?! Everywhere on the web says that funding isn't affected and that's what I told the HT - only I didn't check this with my LEA, I just believed what everyonwe else said

depends on the policy adopted by the LA in any particular area as to whether the school is given full funding when a child is attending part-time. Maybe some LAs don't realise they can choose.

Oops. I wonder if I ought to check with our LA and then let the HT know if I'm wrong, or shall I just keep quiet and plead ignorance if I'm wrong?

PassTheTwiglets, we have not just had this conversation and therefore you have no idea there is anything which needs to be checked.

:)