Does anyone part-time educate at the senior level?

[Wills]

My son is on the autism spectrum but the school refuse to cater for educational needs because, to be blunt, he's doing too well. i am therefore having to spend my evenings teaching him elements that he's not understood during the class. This is a language issue rather than a subject issue which is subtly different to simply not understanding the question. So take history for example. He's just covered world war 1 and was sat in an assessment. The question asked what happened on Christmas day 1914? Being on the spectrum my ds answered that people ate Turkey and swapped presents. However when i explained slowly to try again, this is a history lesson what is special about the date 1914, he was then able to tell me all about the Christmas day truce and the playing of football and gave such an indepth answer that it was incredible. The school don't feel they have the time to teach my son how to understand what the exam questions are asking for. i'd only want part-time because I'm not a teacher but equally i have 3 other children that also need me to spend time with them! Completely at the end of my tether so wanted to explore this option.

Not sure I can really help (or even quite understand what you are wanting) but here goes.
My DD1 has dyspraxia. As part of that she tended to answer very much on the surface too. I did lots of work with her regarding

• what is the subject
• how many marks are there for the answer (you can't write a 1 sentence answer to a 6 mark question)
• the examiner doesn't know what you know. he can't give you marks for things that are 'obvious' that you don't say. the GCSEs are aimed at all levels of abilities so there are quite a few marks available for 'obvious' information.

We did a lot of looking at mark schemes to previous papers in y10&11, and really learning what gains marks.

You don't say what year group your DS is in?

Just need to get DD2 to include some science in her longer science answers and I'll be fine.

hi, thank you for coming back to me. My first born went to a special school but between her and my son (child number 3) the requirements for an EHCP have changed. However even whilst she was in a place that catered to her issues with understanding what questions were asking of her I still had to put in many hours. She's now happily at Uni. Unfortunately my son is at a school that believes in doing triple science by doing each subject individually for a year. So although he's only in year 9 he's sitting his biology next May. So on top of the language issues he's also not get the emotional ability (trying to say he's v. young for his age etc) to understand how important this is. Ugh! But yes, I think I will have to just go back to basics with him.

Sitting in y9? That's ridiculous.
On the other hand you can focus on that 1 subject and then hopefully it will be less hard to transfer the techniques to the other subjects later.

At least with biology they don't go past 6 mark questions, do they?

Treat the examiners as if they know very little, but don't give them more detail than the marks for the question.

Good idea, thank you. Yes it is somewhat ridiculous - I get their thinking, but it doesn't allow for them to mature.

Just imagine. You might want to do biology A level, yet you won't have studied it for the previous 2 years.

EXACTLY!