Deferring Year 9

[Bimkom]

Anyone have any experience deferring a year within Secondary School.

DD is a summer baby, and if they had been allowing delay at the start of her reception the way they are allowing it now, I am sure I would have kept her back.

And all through her school career, while she is bright, and has mostly kept up, it has been a struggle on an emotional level.

She is now finishing Year 7. And because of a whole range of factors coming together for our family I am seriously thinking about taking her out at the end of Year 8, "home schooling" her for a year, and then putting her back into school the following Year in Year 9 - so in fact she wouldn't miss any years of school.

I realise I would need to talk to the school about it, as I would hope for her to go back into the same school, but wondered if there was anybody else out there who had done it, knew somebody who had done it, or who had any thoughts?

School will not hold her place

You have my sympathy OP. You sound like a lovely mum who wants the best for her family.
I do pick up from your posts that your DD will struggle to return to formal education and it would be worth exploring other options with her. From what you have posted I can't see her difficulties resolving by becoming the oldest in her peer group. It sounds like there are some complicated issues going on and you have so well to get her this far.

Home education as a teen doesn't necessarily mean a parent needs to be around and involved as with younger children. Especially if you use a service like interhigh.

You say her issues are around the speed she takes to do things- answer questions, unpack her bag and park up her bag etc. How do you see holding her back a year will help this? Things will still be done at the same speed.

As for taking her time to do things making sure they are right- many kids face exactly the same problem in exams and tests, if they had another half an hour could concentrate more on questions instead of rushing it etc.

I'm sorry, and please forgive me if I sound nieve on this, but having taught and seen people pack their bags at the end of a lesson, what exactly is she doing to take so long? Are their any OCD traits which means she's packing in a particular order, or counting whilst doing etc, that takes up the time?

Are their any OCD traits

I don't think it is OCD, if I had to look for a special needs type diagnosis, I might head more towards ADD, ie she seems to struggle to concentrate on the task in hand, rather keeping on being distracted by what else is going on (either externally or inside her head)

I think you should take her out, follow your plans and see what happens.

She might never go back. There is so much support online for Home educating at GCSE and beyond. It might suit her better than school, which seems to make her very miserable.

It's a very rigid system and although many manage, many don't. Your dd is lucky to have a Mum who can think out of the box.

You say her issues are around the speed she takes to do things- answer questions, unpack her bag and park up her bag etc. How do you see holding her back a year will help this? Things will still be done at the same speed.

Well no, because every year she does get that little bit faster. The problem is, so does the rest of the class.

If you think about it, we all know that younger children take longer to do things. In DDs primary school, they didn't have the reception kids change into PE uniform, just into plimsolls, and when asked why, they said that at that age, it took them too long to change, and it would use up most of the PE lesson. By Year 1 they had them change into PE kit, but they had the PE lesson at the end of the day, so they didn't have to change back, just went home in their PE kit. By Year 2, they were expecting them to change both in and out, and it was that year that DD kept being abandoned in the PE changing room, because the teacher didn't want to hold up the whole class waiting for her. But by Year 3, although she was probably still the slowest, she had speeded up sufficiently that the gap between her and the next slowest wasn't so dramatic.
Similarly we all know that buttons and laces are hard for little fingers, but as they grow older, they grow into handling them with ease.

And the same thing is true with writing. When they are first taught to form their letters, they go so slowly that only a sentence or two is expected of them at any one time, the following year, a bit more, and on and on. Every year they raise the bar a little bit higher.
But schools have an enormous amount of experience in teaching, and they pretty much know what an average cohort at any given age can do. So many parents of Year 6 children at around this time tell me that their DC is "oh so ready for high school", because they are. That is not to say that most Year 7s do not struggle at first with having to move themselves from classroom to classroom, and pack and unpack numerous times a day, it is hard for them at first. But by mid year they have normally sussed it. DD hasn't sussed it yet. My best guess is that she will by about mid year next year, but by then there will be new demands that your average Year 8 student has, and she will struggle.
Look, in DS2's year there was a boy who was playing football two years above his age group. When it came to sports day, not only did this boy come first every single time, there was sometimes several metres between him and the second place winner. He was just very very able at sport (academically was another matter).

My sense is that DD is the opposite, she is working at the year group below, not academically, but regarding anything that needs speed or agility, including penmanship and also both physically and psychologically. The girls in her year tower over her, some of them might even be as much as a foot taller, and most of them look like women, whereas DD is still looking very much like a girl. Most of them have started their periods. Looking at DD, and knowing when I started, I would guess we are at least a year away from that. That doesn't mean I need to rush to a doctor just not be surprised that she is not interested in some of the things her year are in, because clearly the hormones are not yet circulating.

As for taking her time to do things making sure they are right- many kids face exactly the same problem in exams and tests, if they had another half an hour could concentrate more on questions instead of rushing it etc.

I absolutely agree, but at what point does the rushing become so extreme that much of the test becomes reasonably meaningless?

Of course, that depends on what you are testing. Take fractions - is the job of the test to find out who does or does not know how to solve fractions, or is it to find out who can solve fractions at speed? Now you could have a test that does both. If you have a test with fractions of an equivalent difficulty throughout, then the kid who can't do fractions will not do it at all; the kid who can do fractions at speed will do very well, and the kid who can do them but not very fast will do half the paper.

But if (as with most papers do) have a series of questions with increasing difficulty, if the second half of the paper is left blank, you won't know whether that is because of speed problems or because of a lack of ability to do harder fractions problems. When the paper is not just fractions, but fractions and angles and indices, and graphs and a dozen other topics, you won't know whether the kid who only gets half way couldn't do the questions that happened to fall in the second half, or whether they could, but couldn't handle speed.

For some jobs speed is essential. Air traffic controllers need to be able to react with speed, as do derivatives traders. But if your goal is to measure knowledge absorbed rather than speed, then having a kid who only finishes 70% of the paper due to speed problems means that you just can't assess where they are on 30% of the syllabus.

I understand your travel ideas m, but are you going to be happy not to see your oldest for months and go off traveling? Are you going to have him home some weekends?

Were it not for DS1, I might be looking at spending six months to a year in Australia. I could even stick DD is school there (she is an Australian citizen through me)- except I really don't think she would cope, but a more resilient child might have a ball.

But because of DS1, I am assuming we would go to Australia for a month, come back and see him, go for a couple of weeks to Brazil, come back and see him etc. I am hoping that we would have him home, say around a weekend a month. Also there will need to be settling in periods, I can't see us doing any travelling in the first part of the academic year while we get him settled. But maybe by January.

And taking your DD away from her few friends seems crazy. Re-entering an established year group will be very hard and isolating.

Yes, this is the thing that is worrying me most. But it is worth understanding where her few friends come from. DD switched schools about a month into Year 5. Again, suddenly, very, very unhappy, and the best I could work out about it was that it was a small community school, and there had been quite a bit of attrition - so that there were by then only six other girls in DDs class, and they had pretty much paired, so that when they had to work in pairs, DD had to work with a boy. And after years of not really noticing what was going on socially, DD had suddenly woken up and reached the stage of development where she noticed that there was nobody to play with in the playground.
And then I was chatting to a friend who just happened to have taken a new job as the administrator of a neighbouring school. And she, in passing, said to me, "it is really odd, we have a very long waiting list at every year level, except in Year 5, we have these two open places that haven't been filled since two families left in May". And I said to her "I think we might be interested in one of those places". I had a discussion with DD, and the following Monday we went to see the school (I took DD in late to her other school). I asked DD as I dropped her back whether this was what she wanted, and she gave me an emphatic yes. So I went straight back home and filled in the LEA form, then ran around filling in the faith requirements form, which I dropped into the school Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon we had our place, and she started at the school the following Monday.
But I had my heart in my mouth, because who changes their kid at Year 5? But it was a terrific success. If I had been concerned about academics, I might well have said that the new school really didn't push her, but she spent the Year 5 year sociallising and making friends with a couple of other summer babies who were drifting a bit, and by the end of it, they were a close threesome. At Year 6 there were various incidents where eg she didn't finish the practice SATs papers in the time allocated, so she was sent to the library to finish, which she hated, but other than that, she was mostly allowed to cruise, doing averagely well and under the radar, and even if she didn't finish the actual SATs paper (which she told me she didn't), she got the expected level in maths, so nobody fussed.
And one of a range of reasons for going to this high school was because that is where her two best friends were going. But best friend number one is in Set 1 for the subjects she is in Set 2 in, and in Set 2 for the subjects she is in Set 1 in, and best friend number two is in Set 3. And the school isn't very happy about her cruising in Set 2 due to her not finishing papers, when she is capable of more. And a fourth girl has joined up with the group, who is also in Set 3, so best friend number two and this new girl are spending more and more time together, and it is becoming more like two pairs.

Oh, it is also worth noting that she goes to an art therapy group run by one of the charities for siblings of life limited children, and she has become friendly with a set of twins in that group, who I understand from DD are in fact out of year, and should be in DD's year, and who are going to be in her school next year. And we also have family friends who have one girl in DDs year, and a set of twins (boy and girl) who are actually closer to DDs age, but in the year below, and in the old days, when we went there, DD would play with the twins more than the older girl. Now she does interact with the older girl, as they see one another at school, but still seems closer to the twins, both of whom will be in DDs school next year.
So there are already potential friends in the year below - and maybe even more than in her current year. It is mostly best friend number one I am concerned about.
Oh, and DD decided this year she wanted to learn martial arts, and speaking to the sensei, we decided to put her into the younger group, which was supposed to be for primary school, rather than the high school group. So she did that this year, and has enjoyed it very much, and just last week had a trial in the older group, with the other Year 6s going up to Year 7, and that worked very well.
So every time she has a chance, she seems to gravitate towards girls from the year below - except for best friend number one - who is born at the end of August, and is an extreme summer baby. But yes, I am very worried about breaking her up with best friend number one.