Help Please: Anyone appealed a Statement successfully and can assist?

[Dunkerybeacon]

We are appealing part of the statement which has recently been granted for our DD. We want mainstream primary school with ABA 1:1 support funded by LA, LA want to DD to go to Special School for pupils with severe learning difficulties. We believe our DD to have great potential and can see that ABA is working for her; we do not believe that DD falls into the category ?severe?.

One of the arguments the LA uses to support its case it that the Special School is ?fully funded? and can accept further pupils with the current staffing arrangements. Therefore (they argue) it will cost them nothing to send DD there as compared with the cost of funding the ABA programme.

We understand that this is often cited by LAs ...
Does anyone know of any case law, or any situation where this argument by an LA has been defeated?

Their other argument is that there is ?No evidence to support the view that ABA is effective provision? (for ASD)

We know that this isn?t true so Please can anyone point us in the direction of published, refereed
research studies of the effectiveness of ABA/VB?

Have you spoken to ipsea www.ipsea.org.uk

they are very good and helped my with my son's statement.

Hi I am not experienced with appeals yet as I am only starting that road and IPSEA are excellent source of advice and support. Nor do I use ABA at present. Hopefully someone in the know might pop along soon.

One thing I have read a lot on here is that those who have used ABA and then go to tribunal have got proof that there has been improvement for their children

I would suggest paying for a private EP to asses your child to mark these improvements to show the LA the difference of before (old ep report) and after with new report? Good luck :).

At present, she has a 99% legal right to mainstream (unless MS would be unable to cope OR it would damage others' education) and so that should be your/ their starting point: what would she need in mainstream?

this article lists the main cases on SEN costs

what do you mean by ABA 1:1 support? Surely if your dd is at mainstream school she won't be doing ABA anymore or are you going for part time school and part time home? My dd did ABA before starting at mainstream. Initially her ABA tutor went with her part time to support her and eventually was taken on by school as her 1:1. Although she uses ABA style strategies sometimes with dd, she works for the school and her role is to assist Dd with her work in school. She isn't doing a programme. You might have more chance of getting this kind of arrangement than an ABA programme in school which I think would be very difficult to get. (I think another potser here star is trying for this for her ds, with great difficulty) If you want to continue with ABA, can you fund for a while to prove it works and find a school which is prepared to have your dd part time on a flexi schooling kind of arrangement. later on you can then go for tribunal to try and get funding?

We have ABA support in mainstream school on our statement (had to go to tribunal to get any ABA at all, asked for FT programme with part delivered in mainstream setting, and we left it open whether to use a private tutor or train a school TA in ABA and the Tribunal went with the private one).
DS does 1/3 of ABA hours in school and 2/3 out of school with plan to increase over time once can learn in that environment. So the ABA 1:1 support in school is not employed by school. But that is unusual and it helped we got the statement before we had to name a school as DS was still at nursery so schools were happier to accept it knowing a tribunal had ordered it and LA was paying for it.

You don't need much research for tribunal. SCAMP study (see research autism) often quoted. But Tribunal staff all had training along lines that no single intervention works for every child, ABA is one approach which has been effective for some children, and therefore they just ask themselves if it works for this particular child. Tribunals really don't want to get into discussion about research, they don't want to set precedents eg ABA is best. Therefore they will only look at if it works for your child and other methods have not worked.
Research autism website rates ABA above TEACCH etc.