fed up with being told "she wont get a statement" "your struggle to get her statemented"!!

[lisad123]

Had this from 3 seperate proffessionals!
Do they think im stupid? Do they think I dont know we are going in for afight?

I have also been asked why im going for statements and i do understand it doesnt come with funding anymore

When you get told crap lies like that you should ask them to put those statements in writing - which they obviously won't because they know they are leying to you.

You of course know they are leying but what makes me really is that there are a lot of parents who still trust the word of teachers / SENCOs / etc and their children are denied the support they are entitled to.

They should pay for their lies by losing their jobs - but they won't

why did I type leying twice!!

They are trained to say this to everyone. It's a form of rationing that's morally wrong as what it means in practice is that only those children with the bravest parents get th help they need.

Funding for a state education, is not and never has been an individual parents concern.

On the front line the law has not changed - your child is legally entitled to the
support needed to access the national curriculum via an adequate education. A statement is the ONLY way your child can have any kind of assurance under the law that they will recieve the gift of an education that ALL kids in the UK should recieve as a matter of course. It's a parents responsibility to stand up and ensure that this happens.

The internal office politics of your LEA are not your problem. If they don't have the resources then they should obtain them immediately. In most cases the cost of the LEA barrister and expert witnesses (who could be working that day directly with kids!) is roughly equal to or more than the cost of provision being contested, and that's before we get to the council tax funded adult social care costs of the failures in previous years.

I was originally made to feel pushy/demanding/plum crazy when I applied for a statement, depending on which professional was patronising me at the time. Now everyone agrees he should have been statemented years before he was. Those are lost years we can never recover.

If I have one BIG regret it's that I wasn't "pushy" at the outset of our sen journey. By the time I pulled on my big girl pantees a helluva lot of damage had been done. Please don't make my mistake. Until your miracle is grown & flown you HAVE to fight the battles that your child is too vulnerable to do alone.

Always email them straight back and ask them to confirm that what they have just told you ie you won't get statements, they don't come with funding (depends where you are IME) etc is correct. You'll get more retractions and u turns that way.
You know you are in for a fight so that's half the battle anyway.
Dd's SENCO said to me soon after dd started school "I always wondered why mini insanity has a statement (she got hers before she set foot in nursery) when we can't secure statements for children with far less ability then she has. Now I know it's down to sheer determination and a refusal to accept that anything less than what you want for her"
You can do that too and you will have plenty here urging you on and helping you out along the way too.

insanityscratching I have recently been told that the Government is planning to remove funding from Statements and direct fundingto schools with high levels of deprivation. Thisof course assumesthat middle class children in middle class schools will be OK (afterallthey obviously don't havespecial needs). This is set to cause a crisis in a schoolIknow of witha high number of statements(often for ASD) and a low number of children on free school meals.

Whether the statement comes with funding or not though a tight specified and quantified statement will have to honoured in law by the school whether or not there is extra funding. In that situation it is the children on school action and school action plus that will suffer as the statemented children will get first pickings. It may even mean a loss of class TA's and other resources but the school will have a legal duty to maintain the statement.

All the more reason to push for statementing and to get the statement tight IMO If a school refuses to fund the LEA are forced to pick up the tab although they don't advertise the fact.

Just starting out on the Statementing journey. Have put DS, 19 months, into children's centre as a route to a Statement, but now I have been told by our advisory teacher we have to postpone Statement in order to gather more evidence.
A couple of questions:
Does DS HAVE to be in a childcare setting in order to be Statemented?
As all the other professionals (apart from children's centre) have worked with DS for over a year won't there be enough evidence already?

My two had never set foot inside any educational setting when they got their statements. Reports came from ed psych who saw them at home, Early Years SEN teaching service, CP,SALT,OT.

they are changing rules here, funding is not attached to a statement, school have pot of money and they need to spread it out between all the SN children with a statement.
I have meeting with ed phys for DD1 too, so need to look into statementing for her too.
I wouldnt mind but dd2 has a CARS score of 37, has half age in one area on early years assessment and is rating 24-30month in 3 areas, 30-36 in one other and the only area she is in her age range is gross motor skills. She is 50months old.
I have OT and physio reports here too.

WHY do they make things so damn awkward

I cant add anymore to help other than I have everything crossed that you beat these lying so and sos xx

But lisa out of the pot allocated to schools the statement will have to be maintained first and foremost. Yes statements might not be popular with schools purely because the school will be forced to honour it above everything else but they are the only way a parent has to ensure a child's needs are met.Funding isn't your problem at the end of the day it's down to the school to slug it out with he LEA as far as I am concerned.
If dd's school mentioned funding was tight, I wouldn't feel in the least bit guilty that my dd's statement was being met at the cost of children with less significant needs tbh. I'd still insist they met it to the letter and to go cap in hand to the LEA if they had to.

Oh Lisa,

That stupid funding thing. WHAT on earth do they think you think you can do with the 'funding'? Buy a new car?

The straightforward answer of course is that you are not asking for provision, but for her needs to be identified and met and you couldn't care less if they met them with an unpaid voluntary workforce or with reusable laminate.

FFS

sorry, you ARE asking for provision but you are NOT asking for funding. Why would you. Their resourcing is not your concern or interest.

Hellen It is easier to get a statement if you keep your child the hell away from educational insitutions ime. Apply now and apply yourself. There is nothing to lose. Your child does not have to 'fail' and lack of evidence is itself not a reason to refuse a statement as per SENCOP.

Something I'v noticed ancdotally is that statements seem to be easier to obtain the younger the child's age at application. I'm not saying it's easy for anyone but your chances of a request for assessment made for a nursry aged child are FAR more likely to be accepted by the lea than that of a teen. It's as if they think "well you've coped this long, so you can just carry on doing so", no matter the consquences to the child. It's a very twisted interpretation of the much vaunted early intervention propaganda.

An assessment of needs takes 6 months, which in real terms is the best part of an academic year, especially if implementation is delayed for any reason. If the final statement doc produced by the lea is not as it should be, be the time you go to tribunal etc, you could be looking at time from 1st application to implementation of decent statement of 18 months.

Offically it is not until the lea has performed a formal assessment of needs that anyone will have any idea of what the costs of givng your child provision even are. Think about it sens are SO very varied that provision may cost £2K or £200k as yet neither you nor any professional actually knows. So anyone putting a parent of even trying to find out what it is their child needs to obtain an adequate education is to my mind being very dishonest.

LEAS have a statutory duty to educate your child. It's enshrined in law and is the ONLY concern anyone professional or parent should have at the stage you are at OP.

On another note - if you make the statement application rather than an institution it's easier to track progress. You also have better rights of appeal. For this reason alone it's worth the price of a stamp today.

Hi - nothing remotely helpful to add other than I'm in the same boat and hopelessly confused. My son (ASD 3.8) needs 1:1 support at prechool (which he got without much fuss) yet I'm told repeatedly will not get a statement for school but will have some financial allowance instead as most children with ASD do not get statements anymore. Makes no sense to me at all and I guess I need to take a deep breath and apply myself as I cant see how he will be able to manage in a class of 30 without support.

Hi Nibsy

re this part of your comment

"..yet I'm told repeatedly will not get a statement for school but will have some financial allowance instead as most children with ASD do not get statements anymore"

Please do not get taken in by such lies because such talk is designed to put parents off from applying. Ignore the naysayers and apply for the statement yourself from the LEA asap. If you're wondering what to write re them use IPSEA's website which is www.ipsea.org.uk; there are model letters on there you can use.

If I had £1 for every time I have heard similar to the above I'd have enough money for a plane ticket to NYC by now!.

Nibsy my ds and dd both with ASD had statements in place at your ds's age and they still have them ds now 13 years later and dd more than five years later. In my experience treat everything told to you by LEA's about statements as most likely untrue until you either have it in writing from whoever said it (they won't risk that) or until you have had it confirmed by either IPSEA, SOSSEN or ACE as that being the case.

Should say dd2 is only 4 and at nursery. Better don my hard hat!

Yes,

DS got his statement when he was 3 1/2. We started the whole process at about 2 1/2. I was told by most professionals that it was a waste of my time and that he didn't need one.

The educational psychologist was the most negative.

Anyway it didn't actually turn into much of a struggle at all. I just kept my head down and kept pushing through - so that one stage after another was completed. I sent as much information as I could to the educational psychologist after DS's initial assessment to say why I thought he needed a statement (she didn't pick up on much in her assessment ).

Was it worth it?

Yes. DS is now in mainstream school and more things have come up now that he is older. I honestly don't think we'd be taken so seriously if he didn't have a statement. Having one gives me much more confidence that we can do our best for him.

And I do think it would be much harder to try and get one for DS at this older age. They'd be able to fob us off, I think, and say that he was doing fine without it.

Like Skewiff my two definitely benefited from having a statement from the beginning. Ds would have got one anyway as he was pretty unmanageable, in fact the school nursery dd attended asked whether I was pushing for support before he entered the nursery as they couldn't take him unsupported based on what they saw when I took and collected dd.
My youngest dd though wouldn't have got a statement, she's quiet, compliant and very bright with no behavioural issues and few if any social skills difficulties.
Had she not had a statement she wouldn't have been on the school's school action radar tbh.At AR both school and I have to be creative at points to to ensure she keeps the support

Could I butt in with a question here? My DS (7) has just been diagnosed with AS, he has been on an SA+ / IEP since he started school and the support they are giving him is very good so far, he also gets NHS OT and SALT support. I have had the "not bad enough for a statement" comment too. But I often get the "why haven't you applied for one yet if he has AS" comment from people who know about SN but not much about him or his school.

So far I haven't felt he needed one, he is, as Insanity describes her DD, quiet, compliant, bright, no behavioural issues and happy. However socially I think the gap is widening between him and his peers. I am sure he will need a statement at some point and I know it takes a long time, but I am just not sure what I would be asking for if I were to apply right now. So I am constantly thinking I should apply for one but not knowing on what basis. Insanity, what support does your DD get with her statement?

All you need to remember is that you are asking for a statement of Special Educational Needs not a "Statement of Costs of Education".

It doesn't matter how much your DD's needs will cost the school, if she has those needs, they must provide.

-If she gets a Statement, the school must meet the provision specified in Part 3.
-The school get a pot of money to fund SEN at school.
-The school have to spend that money sensibly.
-The SEN CoP says that regardless of how they distribute money, it is the LA's ultimate responsibility to meet the SEN of children they educate.
-The SEN CoP says that if a school doesn't put the provisions specified in a Statement into place, the LA have the power to supply those provisions and bill the school.

Parents should have no input or concern for the financial liability of their child's provision.

Dd gets twenty hours support from a TA attached to her. Her TA isn't particularly needed much of the time to be honest and dd often re directs her to help elsewhere as she prefers to work with her peers. Her class teacher is particularly good though and can read dd really well and that makes a difference. Her class is quiet, well organised and calm which helps her no end and her teacher automatically breaks down instructions into bullet points on the board. Has very clear and well established routines and is very sympathetic to any sensory difficulties and very willing to work with me.
Each day dd spends time working on her IEP, current targets are working on organisation (she is very scatty) and independence (probably because she has always had support), emotional literacy and a physio programme to build core stability.
The reason she gets twenty hours is that when I applied for a statutory assessment when she was two she had a developmental age of 6 to 12 months and a dx of moderate to severe autism.After a huge amount of intervention dd currently has no delays and the autism is pretty much invisible tbh.
Our LEA are very lax when it comes to reassessment and so long as the Annual Review shows that she has needed support ( we play down the positives and big up any difficulties) and will continue to need support then nothing really changes just a few tweaks to the statement.
There is no way if I were applying now I'd get a statement tbh because she doesn't have any significant difficulties in any area.

Whoknows

School Action Plus can be limited in scope and the support offered on it can vary immensely. I am really glad to see that his current school are supportive but you cannot take it as given that he will receive that same level of level of support in secondary school. If SALT is needed too, then that should be in a statement document.

Look closely at the IEP's; has adequate progress been made with regards to levels of attainment. Is his social/communication difficulties impacting on his ability to learn?. That is just one strand of how I would approach the LEA. Are there still gaps socially between him and his peers; the IEP should give information on how the school is tackling such issues. Does the SENCO talk to you often about DS's progress in school?.

Again ignore the, "he's not bad enough for a statement" type comments. Its patently not about how supposedly "bad" they are; its not like that at all. The only criteria for a statement is need. You won't also know how the land lies re the LEA until you yourself apply for this. As his mother you can appeal their crass decision if the LEA say no to assessment, also if you apply you know its been done then.

Statements are not only for academic needs; they are also for addressing social/communication needs as well. If you are noticing that the gap is widening between your DS and his peers then it certainly is - and it will widen as he becomes older. Playtimes may well be problematic for him and he may feel socially isolated. Quiet, non disruptive and emotionally undemonstrative children with SEN in class more often than go unnoticed by teachers and problems do not get picked up till a lot later. In a couple of years time he will be at secondary and that school type of system can be a nightmare for children with additional needs whose needs are not fully met.

I end on a personal note. I know of too many children with all types of special needs where it has all fallen apart in secondary and I would not want your son to be potentially subjected to the same.