Help with statement please - and advice from ABA-ers please (again... sorry)

[BialystockandBloom]

We've been given the go-ahead for a statutory assessment for ds (asd) and are at the stage of providing our parental report for (hopefully) a proposed statement.

I have already written two pretty detailed reports - the first was the letter requesting the SA in the first place, then the report on which they based their decision whether to go ahead with the SA. In the 2nd report I listed in detail all the difficulties ds has.

So - what more do I need to write now? Should I just reiterate what I have already said?

The other issue is that we're doing ABA, and my ideal scenario would be that ds is funded with an ABA-trained 1-1 during school hours, and some home time too. He is due to start primary school this September. I have been told that my LA does not fund ABA (of course) but I am gathering together evidence of ds's development based on our programme and plan to fight for this if necessary.

So, should I be upfront now and ask for exactly what we want, and provide them with evidence, or should I hold back some ammunition for an (inevitable) tribunal?

Btw sorry I am repeating this, I already asked about this a while ago and had some v useful advice (thank you) - but my head is in a whirl about this.

when i did mine we were advised to add anything however small or insignificant extra information if anything new had occured ,to keep it fairly short, just address the changes you want and keep a couple of things up your sleave ( a plan b for the tribunial if you like) PP read through the draft for me gave us pointers and much appreciated advice we were told to bullet point the demands very frankly what we expect /need for our DS inc what school, then signed it and wrote what school we wanted in part 4 and that was it just two extra pages and so they couldnt say they were lost i clipped them together , you could if your suspicious record deliver them so you know they have got it i also rang them to check they had it as our posts useless HTH

My son was statemented at 2.5, and we were lucky enough to get funding for a home ABA programme, and for an ABA 1:1 at mainstream nursery twice a week. At the assessment stage we finally came clean re everything we wanted, having previously kept completely shtum about the programme we had started up and were self-funding. Our parental submission included reports from our ABA consultant and supervisor, and we managed to convince the LA EP that ABA had worked wonders for our son so she wrote a report as sympathetic as she was able to without being shot by her paymasters

Now is definitely the time to lay it all on the line!

we were upfront from the start as to what we wanted (in our case ABA school)

I mentioned it on my parental submission for SA. went through all the questions - outlined all dd1's issues, and how her placements in both MS and ASD school (TEACCH based) had amounted to precisely nothing.

we provided evidence that MS had not worked (anecdotes as to how dd1 had been misunderstood) along wiht evidence as to what she could achieve at home on her ABA programme.

as time went on, and the SA was underway, more evidence came to light (post our submissions, but before final EP submissions etc). this we did nt submit. it was part of our "further evidence" folder or tribunal (which we were counting as inevitable, given what we were asking for)

every time I had a conversation with our case officer/EP/anyone connected with the case I made it clear we would not settle for anythign less than ABA school.

Ime it doesn't hurt to let them know what oyu are hoping for - it builds a consistent picture of what you are aiming to achieve. the SA forms will ask what your thoughts are re: provision.

I agree its probably time to say you want ABA or at least say intensive evidence based intervention
Parental statement will count as an Appendix (App A) to any Statement and so will go in the bundle for Tribunal; but crucial at this point any evidence you provide also has to go to the professionals who have been asked to write reports / schools approached.
You can just rehash what you have written already but I would re-title it Parental Submission for SA etc so its clear this is to go in the Appendix
Your previous reports won't automatically be circulated - but any appendix to the Statement does have to be.
You can hold back evidence eg about costs - our LA EP had not idea about ABA costs so backed us but had he known I suspect his report for SA would have been different, so I would not mention costs right now.
We did not put in evidence eg reports until they refused to put ABA on statement.
We summarised why we wanted ABA / what ABA had achieved but did not give ABA reports / detail etc.
I was worried (justifiably) that the autism outreach teacher would just jump on any bandwagon or copy programmes so I referred to progress but did not set out the detail of the programmes etc.
I did not want to give too much info about how we were achieving the progress as otherwise they would just have said oh we do all that.
We kept that up our sleeve until after outreach had written their report and after we had appealed the statement and the LA had responded to the appeal. Then we hit them with ABA report and all the detail - which contrasted splendidly with the sheer lack of detail or programmes in the outreach paperwork.

Thanks for all the replies.

The SA forms don't actually give any guidelines - just a blank page for 'parental report' so I wasn't even sure if I should just list again the difficulties ds has, or whether I should be asking for what we want. Thanks for the help on this.

fedup the LA already know we're doing ABA (we have a tutor shadowing ds at nursery, and the Early Years practitioner knows all about it) so unfortunately we can't surprise them with it. How did you manage to get the LA EP onside? Am I allowed to contact them directly? He's going in to nursery to observe ds in a couple of weeks.

So I suppose I need to put aside any worries about pissing off the nursery by being frank about how they have failed to make any progress with ds then?!

silverfrog were you successful at tribunal?

if you PM me an email address, I can look out and send on our Parental submission, if you think that owuld help (obviously the issues will be centred on my dd1, but just for interest, to see what one looks like!)

LA settled before Tribunal.

we had won funding for out of county school/independent at placement panel (as there was no state place within county for dd1). LA was dragging feet with naming ABA school, and in fact named the pre-school (TEACCH based) that dd1 was at - wholly inappropriate, as dd1 was then Yr1 age) - I guess their plan was to leave her there until next place cam up at state TEACCH based school.

I htink the clincher for us was LA EP evidence, though. he saw dd1 at pre-school, and classe dher as severe, non-cummunicative, withdrawn and very hard to engage.

we made him see her at home as well, and he of course saw the opposite, as he observed an ABA session. still worte a mixed report thoguh

the real clincher was that we put dd1 into the ABA school (self funded) whil we waited for Tribunal. LA sent EP along to rip holes in it all, and he saw as big an imprivement in dd1 between home/ABA school as he had seen between TEACCH pre-school and home. LA settled not long after, so I htink they were not convinved that he woudl be able to lie/misrepresent accurately at the Tribunal...

Agnes sorry x-posted. Thank you so much (again! I have saved your reply to my other thread - so useful).

One of our tutors has prepared graphs based on the data collection since the programme began last September. They clearly show how in all areas ds has made huge progress. Should I then keep these back if needed for a tribunal?

Really useful stuff about costs, thank you.

You said "crucial at this point any evidence you provide also has to go to the professionals who have been asked to write reports / schools approached." Sorry, don't quite understand this - do you mean my report will go to the other professionals aswell as the LA panel? The other bodies asked for reports are the nursery, the LA EP, SALT, Early Years practitioner, and our ABA consultant. Or do you mean I should send them a copy of my report?

You're absolutely right - our EY practitioner has already tried to conflate the 'support' she's providing with our ABA programme. While repeatedly telling us the LA don't fund ABA, every time we meet her she asks us exactly what targets we're working on with ABA and how we're doing it - so we basically incorporate everything we're doing with ABA into the IEP targets for nursery, which is basically just them copying our programme. It's a farcical situation. And of course, without our tutor there shadowing ds, the nursery would have made absolutely zero progress with any of this. But how do I demonstrate this?

Last question (sorry so many!) - so did you also talk directly to the LA EP before he submitted his report? How would I go about this?

Thanks again, I really appreciate this. What would we do without MN

silver thank you, will pm you

Am feeling extremely satisfied on your behalf about your outcome - you must have felt gooood about that

Well I was lucky in that our EP was a young, seemingly pretty naive woman, who was at exactly the same stage of pregnancy as me at the time (her first, my third) so I groomed her bonded with her over baby talk. Then got a bit tearful and told her that she would see when she was blessed with her beautiful new DC that a mother will do anything on earth to achieve the best for her child...

Mind you, the first statement was still dire, with no mention of ABA, but I went along to a meeting with the head of SEN (with my advocate) and they agreed pretty easily to ABA then. Which was mind-blowing, but truth be told they had v little else to offer him until he turned 4, which was a way off.

Now he is heading to an ABA school in September, so we've been very lucky. But then since he was dx I was fixed on that goal (could never see him in MS) so I suppose I had 18m to gather evidence with that specific placement in mind. They simply could not argue with his progress and seemed to accept that they had nowt else, yet again, that would compare.

I also had a few nerve shredding moments when I had to go through with my game plan and shaft the useless portage lady/ SALT, but only insofar as revealing quite how dire their ASD knowledge was and how little they would ever have achieved for my son. I had tolerated them for months specifically so i could compare and contrast with ABA when the time came.

The EP saw us at home as well as DS at home and nursery. We had a good talk about what we wanted and why we wanted it. He then came and talked to us about his report afterwards.

In theory the appendices are supposed to be shared with everyone I think but it did not happen in our case. But in theory as I understand it your parental info should go to EP and anyone else they have asked to do report. But the SEN officer should do all this you just have to submit it to SEN officer

I think its fine to put in graphs etc but as you seem to have similar situation to us don't give away too much about the how. What you want is them to have rubbish notes compared to yours. You also don't want them to be able to claim credit for your work. We worked on different targets in ABA than did SALT. The outreach team never bothered to set any targets.

Are the nursery pro ABA? A supportive Appendix B from them would help. Our nursery were very positive about ABA to the EP and very negative about SALT / outreach. We did not get ABA named until tribunal but our LA are not the kind to worry about trivial stuff like evidence they took us all the way to tribunal without a shred of evidence on their side.

Hi,
We are also preparing for the tribunal. Received the final statement today and LA is not even ready to put 1:1 support in his statement even after the LA EP report and school reports that he needs 1:1 support. We are also aiming for ABA school named in the part4. Very scared at the moment, and would be very grateful if can get any advice on how to prepare my case. What ABA reports should I present as evidence. My son(7.5 years) started doing home ABA programme in June part time and we are funding at the moment. He has made good progress so far considering it's only part time.
Does anyone has any experience with Surrey and if anyone successfully got ABA funding in Surrey?
I have been sending my home ABA targets to school and now I am worried if they would take credit for it :(

Nagr - I am in Surrey, and have won funding for ABA school - although the school is in Kent.

If I can help in any way, do ask (I saw your post on ABA-UK, and believe that my ABA consultant offered to help you out. Take him up on the offer - he knows his stuff)

hi

Sorry to jump into the thread like this. I am sat in front of my PC also trying to come up with the parental report for SA. I just thought I should check Mumsnet for any advice and stumbled on this thread. We are also doing some ABA and I was also wondering how to put in report that we would like ABA and we are in surrey. We would like 1:1 ABA support in school and some ABA at home. my ds starts reception in september

Silverfrog - Really sorry to bother you, but please can I see your parental submission?

Agnes hugely useful advice again, thank you

Nagr I also worry that I have been too open and forthcoming to ds' nursery about both our ABA targets, and in particular, how we are achieving them. We have been incorporating our ABA targets within the IEP - thought it was in ds' best interests, but now realise we've basically been doing their job haven't we. Our shadow tutor has even prepared a guidance note for the nursery staff about current targets (and behavioural issues we're working on), basically a cribsheet for them on how to interact with ds, what to ignore, what to reinforce etc. Hey ho, it's done now. And seeing as any statement awarded won't affect the nursery anyway (as he'll be at school by then), I'm hoping it won't matter too much.

The nursery HT is pretty awful, and basically likes to throw her power around with no knowledge to back anything up. She couldn't really come up with a valid reason to refuse us bringing our ABA shadow in, but finds petty ways to assert her authority about it. Ds' key worker is really supportive - she's also the SENCO so will be the one writing the SA report. Should I suggest we meet to discuss the content of her report?