How do I find out how my child is really doing at school?

[popgoestheweezel]

I have lots of concerns about ds (5.8) and he has seen a pead and has now been referred on to CAMHS for further assessment.
However, when the paed asked how he was at school, and what they were doing to support him, I struggled to answer.
At parent's evening they just made a few woolly comments about there being 'nothing to worry about academically' but that he struggles to sit still and follow instructions and he has emotional outbursts and anger management issues but when we say 'Yes we are really worried about him. What can be done to support him?' they just say 'not much really'.
I want to ask them some specific and clear questions to get some specific, clear and measurable answers on how he is doing in all areas of learning, but what?

Thanks for the great ideas for helping him sit still, I think i'll have a go with one of those weighted lap blankets.
What about helping him follow instructions? His teachers have no ideas here either.

I would make the instructions simple and only give one instruction at a time so not
go to your seat open your book draw a picture of your house and write a sentence
I would probably use his name so he knows the instructions are for him

With older children I use a task prompt basically a velcro strip with laminated pictures of what he needs to do in the order they need to be done

My year 11 form class borrow the blutac from the the back of displays too. Clearly its not something they grow out of!

Thanks mrz, those are great ideas for most children and I think maybe school are doing that, BUT with PDA the last thing you want to do with an instruction is to make it clear and specific. Disguising expectations and using lots of words goes against every technique that you conventionally use for children (esp those with special needs) but it's what works with him. We spent years thinking we were making it easier for him by giving him warnings of what was going to happen next, and making instructions clear. We could never work out why it wasn't working until we discovered PDA and realised we had been inadvertently making it worse for ds!
The thing is that school (with the best of intentions) I think are still doing that with him and don't realise how anxious it is making him. That's no critisism of school as it took us, as his parents, a very long time to work it out!
However, now we know so much more about how to handle him it seems ridiculous that school don't use the same techniques as they really are so much more effective. The problem is how to convince them.