Please can anyone help- dropping out of A levels.

[FloatingthroughSpace]

My DS is autistic and has an EHCP.
He has always loved his school. He did ok at GCSE (5 good passes) but needs to retake English. He writes well but is very slow and severe anxiety means he doesn't get enough written.

He started A levels but has found one of the courses (his best at GCSE) the workload is far too much. Teacher was slow to adapt workload (his GCSE teacher used to get him to do the hardest bit only). He has become very unwell mentally from the stress of not coping with his best subject and it's had a knock-on effect on his other two subjects as he has missed a lot of school.

We suggested he continue with the 2 he's doing ok with and abandon the one he's struggling with. He can understand it all, just not manage the work volume.

He has told me today he wants to stop completely, that he's getting a stress reaction just going into school and feels completely overwhelmed.

I don't care at this point about him carrying on, except that it's a shame for the 2 a levels he was doing ok at. However have been doing research and he's missed the application deadline for local colleges for Sept (our plan B was to look into a more specialised Btech). He really does badly when he has no routine.

What the heck do we do?

I can't call anyone as they are all on half term.

Very few sixth forms do AS exams anymore and they are not part of the A level. All the content of the A levels are examined at the end of the course.

donquixote you'd be surprised; I work with autistic youngsters and my ds' anxiety based freeze response to any kind of ambiguous or open ended question is within the top 3 of the 100s of autistic students I see.

Anyway thank you to everyone for your advice; I can now see that for our ds btec is probably not the way to go; I think we will aim to drop maths for now and try to pick it up later, doing a levels over 3 years.

Your advice, everyone, is very helpful; to date we have not managed anywhere near an hour a day but I wonder if we re- establish a baseline as a sort of new start we could start a stricter routine. He has the hangover of a "work is work and home is home" mentality but now we have evidence that this causes more stress and anguish than it solves.