My 12 yo daughter suffers from chronic migraine and social anxiety - she finds it really hard to make friends.
Last Easter when she was in Y7 we moved to a new area around 30 -45 mins from her school and decided to move her to a school closer to the new house. Unfortunately the one in our town was full so she joined one in the next town over (only a 10 min drive). Although academically she liked her new school she found it really hard to settle and make friends and was getting really upset and miserable and struggling with migraines so we took her out of school just before Easter and enrolled her at Interhigh. This has been great in lots of ways but we’re concerned that she’s missing out on a lot by not being in a “normal” school.
She’s recently been offered a place at our local school - this will be great for her in the long term as it’s a fantastic school and will hopefully mean she’ll get to make some more local friends. She’s been on the waiting list for over a year since we moved so it’s not easy to get a space. The problem we have is that her migraines are really bad at the moment (she’s had some degree of headache every day for the last 3 months) and she’s just started on a new preventative medicine which has some nasty side effects initially, particularly making her feel really drowsy and spaced out. School have said the space has to be taken up by the first week after half term and there is no flexibility in this (they’ve been holding it since before Easter). Ideally I’d like her to start in September which would give her the rest of this term and the holidays to get used to her new medication and hopefully get the migraines under control. We’re also really working on building her confidence back up which was really damaged by her experience at the last school.
I don’t know what to do for the best. Accept the offer at the new school which may mean she really struggles and has to have lots of time off because of her headaches or turn down the offer and then go back on the waiting list and keep her at interhigh until another space comes up, which could be months. A further complication is that the new school starts GCSEs in Y9 so joining later than September might mean its difficult to catch up and she might not get the GSCE options that she wants. Any advice or ideas I might not have thought of?? Also are the school correct that legally they can’t keep the space open? Could I accept the place and then keep her off sick in until the summer (assuming she doesn’t get better in the next 2-3 weeks) so that she doesn’t actually start until September? I’d feel bad doing this but equally starting while she’s struggling is not going to be good for her.