Autistic DS Struggling with school

[j8h]

My DS14 is autistic, and he is in Year 10 right now. He is doing GCSEs next year, and he is consistently worried about subjects like English and RS. He finds it hard to read in between the lines and analyse texts. Do any of your kids have this problem? Does anyone have any tips?

hiya: a bit of context will help here.
Is your DS a high-performing boy who is aiming for the very top (all 8/9, has sights on Oxbridge/high Russell group/oversease scholarships?)

because the advice is different for that , than if he is aiming to get a range of grades enough to go to sixth form and/or a good uni, or if he is wanting vocational training post 16.

Where do his subject interest lie?

because for some children dropping a grade in ANY subject is seen as a disaster, whereas for others, getting them to concentrate on learning the system for one (English) and jettisoning too much work on a “dump stat” (RS: sorry to any theologists) works better in terms of maintaining sanity.

the more literal thinking children will find inference questions tricky: accepting and supporting that and helping them have insight is helpful. specifically explaining it’s not their “fault”, the subjects are just arranged in a way that makes the questions tricky, and then work on strategies to find the “hidden rules” that tock the markscheme boxes enough to get a decent grade. Past question and model answers can be useful in this, as can practicing bullet point question plans for common topics

Honestly he doesn’t know, but he has always done really well in everything else, and he just doesn’t get English or RS.

I always tell all of my students to have a list of things they always look for in order to answer each question. That's a useful technique.

Have you spoken to his teachers? They should be able to give ideas.

My autistic DS in y9 is the same. Autism is tough for working out inference in texts. He often misinterprets the question.

He probably needs to do a bunch of questions which are doing the same thing so he can see what they're getting at?