Would you take this up with the school? Re 11+/dyslexia

[RandomCitizen]

This is really odd and please forgive my rambling, but I've just been among ds and his friends before school, and they were all talking about their 11+ scores.

I'm not sure what to make of it.

Basically all of them had passed, apart from ds and 3 boys who did not sit the test. And from what I could gather, all of them had got what I presume are maximum scores? So, 419...or very near to it.

Ds got somewhere in the low 300s.

This is the bit where I get a bit - out of the three boys who didn't take it, at least two are confirmed dyslexic. The other one is new to the school so I don't know.

So we have a huge contrast. There are three boys who didn't take the test, and are (at least two) dyslexic.

There are 8 other boys who all gained near enough top scores as far as I can work out.

Then there is ds, who got a low score, and was assessed (privately) in y2 as possibly dyslexic and possibly just immature - we have no report - the school has refused, consistently, to acknowledge he has any difficulties.

His IQ was also assessed at the same time as above 140.

I have been asking them all along to help him because he is probably dyslexic but they have done nothing and insisted he has no issues. I have emailed again and again and a lot of the time this has been ignored. They did a ten minute assessment in which he had some elements of dyslexia but even so - no extra help.

I feel that they have let him down - I hadn't realised the chasm between him and the rest of the class was so huge.

What should I say? Or do? I just wonder how they could get everyone else through the test but seem to have written him off as just, well, just stupid? Rather than admitting he could have used some assistance...I don't know what I am trying to say.

www.lucid-research.com/documents/factsheets/FS19_Understandingdyslexia.pdf

The link is to an article which aids understanding of dyslexia. It says that people with dyslexia sometimes have visual processing disorders which make it difficult to identify black and white patterns. I'm sure that you already know all of that, but if we put that into the context of non verbal reasoning then it is easy to see how your son might have been affected in the exam.
I am still quite surprised that he did so well at the verbal reasoning as I would have expected the words in the spellings to be somewhat jumbled up which would have affected his score quite a lot.
I think (as someone has mentioned further up thread) that it might not be a bad thing that he goes to the comp school as they are likely to have more dyslexia training and resources. Senior schools are usually quite good at identifying barriers to learning and putting measures in place to assist.
Have you tried using coloured overlays when your son has been doing non verbal reasoning / maths to see if it helps with the visual perceptions? If he scores differently using coloured overlays then there is a high chance that he could have performed much better in the exam if the right allowances and equipment had been made.

That link also explains about how dyslexia affects mathematics and computational skills which is very relevant for your sons scoring.

Yes, that's a v.good thought Norude. My son has the eye thing - technically known as Meares Irlen Syndrome. It's visual stress connected to light frequency. He has to wear darkly tinted glasses. If he doesn't any black text on white background is impossible as it moves, blurs, etc. I had no idea it existed until he struggled copying from the white board at school. We'd had his eyes tested so I knew they were fine, but a normal optician doesn't pick it up. Easy way to know if your son's affected is just ask him what he sees when he looks at a page of text/ numbers. So do they move, blur, etc> If he says yes need to get him tested, by someone who specialises in it.

Thanks again everyone. Just a quick update.

I spoke with HT yesterday and he was pretty unhelpful. He said it isn't that the school can't be bothered with the middle range children who aren't achieving their potential, it's that they cannot access support for these children because as we knew, the ones who are properly struggling with literacy come first.

I said about the GL site and the 10 point discrepancy (ds's are 14 and 19) and he said, they were dependant on the difficulty of the papers and that a few other children had this sort of scoring profile too.

I don't know, he may be right, he may not.

But I thought test scores ought to be roughly in line.

Anyway he then said it was familiarisation - I countered this as ds did a lot of GL papers. (many children did Bond)

He will ask the senco to call me when she comes in this week, but it was her that tested ds in July and I didn't hear a word about that. I've no idea what the outcome was.

Like the others it seems he has written ds off.

He didn't pass so won't get in. What is the point of appealing and putting him under huge amounts of stress to keep up with his peers?

As for some of the other stuff what have you done at home to help other than to keep emailing the school?

Sorry but I don't feel like responding to what I sense is a bit of a hostile post right now. I might need a cup of tea first.

that a few other children had this sort of scoring profile too.

Of course it's more than likely that they also have the same kind of SpLD that your son does. After all it's not that the school have deliberately ignored your DS, it's that they know nothing about it and aren't looking for it.

SpLD is very, very common.

The real question is what you want to do about it. And that depends on how badly affected he is.

1 option is to get an Ed Psych to assess him privately. This costs hundreds of pounds and will tell you for sure if he does or doesn't have SpLD. It will also give school recommendations as to how they can help him.

As well as the cost there are 3 problems with this:

1. the EP you choose may or may not be any good and
2. the recommendations they make may or may not be any good and
3. the school may or may not act on them.

I don't necessarily want to put you off from getting an EP report, but I'd only recommend it if you have the money spare.

Other than that I think you'd be amazed how much you can find out yourself by researching it. EPs don't recommend anything magic that you can't find out about yourself.

I'm really not being hostile and am sorry that you took me to be so.

I just am struggling to understand why you would want to put your son, who seems to be struggling at primary school, into a grammar where he will be under huge amounts of pressure to succeed.

I asked whether you had been doing anything at home as wondered whether you have had him independently assessed or had any tutoring and what those professionals would have thought.

Op on my phone so will be brief.

However I would question how reliable the 419 scores ate. Over the last 7 years where I have had children og 11+ age. I have yet to come across a year where not at least one child (or parent) exaggerated the 11+score.

The pass mark is 360 the very top is 420 for 3 of his friends to all have scored 419 would be unusual. Do you have a super selective near? Wil they opt for that or do they suddenly opt for the non super " liking it better at second thought" ?

I say this as a parent with a child who scored a decent 408 but not enough for the super selective. Sadly we lost the appeal but happily ds is thriving in the grammar he is in.

I have a elder dd who didn't pass she scored 325 from memory she is also dyslexic. It is heart breaking for them. However she is thriving in her non grammar school. At the end of it all whst you need is the best school for that child.

Going through it all again next year for dyslexic dd3 I doubt she will pass hut she wants to try. I admire that however my favourite school for her is not a grammar. .

Hers however is.

Madame, have to say you were a bit brusque!

Pato, I think the key information is the HT saying he's doing okay so even if he has got a problem we can't help him. They can make excuses about funding all they like, but it's a lousy excuse imo. It's exactly what I was told, even with a dyslexia assessment. Our SENCO admitted to me that unless a child is below average SATs, or has behavioural problems they basically do nothing.

So the key is to prove discrimination/ failure in educating your child. Most schools shout about 'every child matters', so you have to throw that back at them. For that you need facts and figures, so an Ed Psych report is mighty useful. For us it proved that DS's academic level was way below what he was assessed as capable of. We really couldn't have done that without the report, even though it was blindingly obvious to everyone including his class teacher.

I haven't a clue on grammar schools, but in a way that's irrelevant. If your instinct is that your DS is under performing and being let down by the school, it's worth getting him assessed. That sounds like the only way you'll get them to acknowledge any SPLD. Even then it's tough to get help, but at least you've got something to back you up.

And before anyone shouts at me and says your son's HT has a point and there aren't enough resources, well yes I agree, but a good school/ class teacher should be able to support each child's learning needs. Since we discovered our son was dyslexic, the class teacher has done all sorts to help him, so he now has print outs of class work rather than copying from the white board, he uses a dictaphone to dictate creative writing, coloured overlays to help his sight issues. None of them are huge, but they've made a massive difference.

Guys, thankyou all very much indeed (and thankyou Madame C for the apology/explanation - that's very good of you and I understand what you are saying.)

I have another update which is that at the class teacher meetings today, I was told that the senco is in touch with our local dyslexia expert (who we know personally and is completely brilliant) and has asked her to come into school to do the WRIT with ds.

This won't be till after half term now but still - we are finally on the right track. I have spoken to the senco now and we have agreed that she will get this person in for the initial test, and if that indicates there is a problem, then we will pay privately for a full assessment and report because actually, in the test that was done in July, ds couldn't do something that he should have been good at - and so they had been in touch already to try and get some input.

It did take a lot of fuss from me to get them to do all this but at last they are going to try and help.

I want to address what you said MmeC, because it is important - I don't want him to struggle wherever he goes to school, and to that end I think it is really important that we find out how his brain is operating, because (as the senco has now admitted) there is something going on but she can't put her finger on what that is.

It's not classic dyslexia, but we don't know where he is falling down and I really just want to know that so that I can formulate an approach at home, to best help him, and so that the school can have some guidance or access some sort of protocol on how best to support him - and moving into senior school I think this will be really important as well.

Ideally I'd have liked him to have had this sort of input far sooner. I have been asking his teachers regularly since he started school to assess him for dyslexia, we had him assessed in y2, and the result was maybe/maybe not with a high IQ score. We didn't get a report at that stage as the person was too busy...this time I hope we can.

I've also done a fair bit of research on here and asked loads of people for help, the national dyslexia organisations and so on but everyone said even if you get him assessed properly, the school won't be able to do anything/will ignore it unless it is through an ed psych and the school just kept refusing to do this.

At home I have been making charts for him, trying different ways of teaching him visually, of making sense of stuff for him, sat with him doing his homework over and over but without the right methods a lot of it just doesn't seem to enter his brain. It reaches the periphery and kind of floats about.

He has massive issues with concentration and this is as much a hindrance as the other stuff I think.

I wanted to help him but didn't know how, or what was wrong, and no one seemed able to put me in the right direction.

Anyway I don't have a clue how this might affect his secondary school and what influence it might have on any appeal we make. I agree he would find grammar quite hard. But I think if he had the right support, he wouldn't be in that situation in the first place.

I'm not pushy, and I'm not convinced he's a genius. What I do want from this is a way of helping him that actually works, so that he doesn't seel so shit about his own abilities, and can go forward with a little bit of confidence instead of being depressed and unhappy.

Hope that makes sense and thanks again to everyone who gave me the confidence to go in and tell the school I wasn't happy.

Sounds like a good start then!

Pato, Sencos aren't expert (I teach and have a PG dyslexia cert) - I was happy with the support we paid for from Dyslexia Action (after you've gone through school obv). Always ask for a second opinion. HT is talking crap - just because your ds is coping doesn't mean he doesn't deserve the support. I had all this nonsense and it's not fair. Yes my ds got a L4 for lit at KS2, he's still v dyslexic and would have easily been at the top of 5A without it. Yes, he can read above his age, that's because he's clever. He can't process at that speed and it exhausts him to work and achieve as well as his able friends. I'm aware that in some areas performing at 2years below chronological age flags you for dyslexia support - ds was performing above his age in some areas but still way below his potential. What a waste.

I really sympathize with you on this.My child is performing at a much higher level than some of the children who passed 11+ at school but preformed lower on verbal reasoning.He has since been told he's got irlens(Showed signs of dyslexia in school test, told to monitor, not much monitoring as far as I can see,)He said the words were blurry.He didn't quite get the marks needed.Luckily he is now enjoying transition week in an ordinary school with g& t and happy,so hopefully it will work out well when he starts properly.