May I be nosey and ask how many hours LSA support do your ASD dc get?

[Iceflower]

I will be applying for SA for ds (9) in year 4 with view for transition to secondary. He would need

1. someone to meet him at beginning of each day with books/timetable etc for the day. He compartmentalises school and home and won't bring anything from school.

1. someone to take him from class to class

1. support during lessons as he won't do any work otherwise

4.support to take him to homework club after school and sit with him while he does it.

These needs are evidenced by class teachers, OT and clinical psychologist. An LA EP will be assessing him soon (outside the SA process at my request), and a private ASD salt.

When I add all these up, it comes to at least 35 hours per week LSA support. In primary school support is being offered informally, and with the help of parent volunteers.

I haven't come across anyone receiving 35 hours per week, and wondered if any of your dc have?

My ds is in primary ms and gets 19hrs and the school supply the rest. I do know two children that get 30hrs in ms so it is possible. But with anything you'll need to fight and the school and surrounding professionals will need to all support you on the basis that he can't access the curriculum without. I'm sure someone with secondary experience will be along soon

I work with children with and they have 10 hours each and one has none! it's ridiculous! In reality, they get full time support and i do 4x the work! It sounds like he needs someone full time but I think you'd be lucky to get support for homework club tbh.

That's primary school though too.

Oh and I missed of they all have asd. Sorry for all the posts!

Dd gets 20 hours support in primary, ds got full time 1 to 1 support so 35 hours in an ASD unit for secondary but is now in a specialist school. In our LA full time 1 to 1 support is rare but ds had his from entering nursery.Have you considered looking at ASD units or specialist schools as well?

36. Took a lot of fighting though!

dd gets 25 hours in primary.

35 ABA hours which is a bit different as over half of it is out of school and we had to go to tribunal to get that. They will not cover homework club (assuming its optional) as only entitled to FT school (32.5 hours). We get more than FT school as DS gets 48 weeks per year ABA but again we had to prove educational reason for that at tribunal.

The only way to cover homework club I think would be via direct payments / volunteers / out of DLA / some sort of childcare support funding

DS got 20 hours in Secondary, but that was to be in addition to what the school were already providing (said this on Statement). He used to go to the Learning Centre before school to calm down ready for the day and then go to his formroom. Quite a lot of the support was on an adhoc basis. If he was having a bad day he got more support, on a good day less. Also TAs were subject based, so he had different TAs for different subjects. It worked well, but school had around 50 Statemented pupils so knew what they were doing.
Others in his school had more hours on their Statement, but they tended to be the ones who already had Statements in Primary. DS went to Secondary on SA+ and was Statemented in Year 8.

Ds had a reduced timetable so that homework was done in school with a TA because it's unlikely he'd have done homework at home. All the students in the unit had a reduced timetable so that homework, life skills and social skills were part of their curriculum.

Wow, back from Sainsbo's to find your very helpful replies . not paranoid 36 hours is impressive, so it's not impossible then!

I have already had a meeting with the prospective mainstream school deputy head and SENCO, and they agreed ds definitely needed a statement and would support the application. They seemed to think covering homework club wasn't an issue, but this will probably change once we get down to the nitty gritty .

I think while he is in primary, he probably won't need FT help, but definitely when he goes up to Secondary

zero........

DS2 (Y1) has 1:1 support for the entire time he is in school and DS1 (Y3) for all but the odd half hour when he's doing something he likes in small groups. There's usually a class TA on hand when his own 1:1 is having a lunch break. About 75% of this is funded through statements and the school funds the rest.

DD year 4 has 25 hours 1:1 support, awarded by Tribunal; is in small mainstream primary and also gets a lot of "informal" support at break times and lunch time too.
School fund all of it, as where I live the LA don't give any extra money out to the school if a child has a Statement.

Small wonder schools are reluctant to apply for SA . It has taken me two years to get school on board for SA, the response previously was "why would ds need a statement, he's getting everything he needs". Except that everytime I blinked, they tried to reduce some of the support...

We have just returned our amendments to ds1's proposed statement, in which we have attempted to specify and quantify 8 hours. I am not expecting them to accept this though and really expecting them to refuse to quantify (based on other people's experience with our LEA and their rep with organisations such as IPSEA). If they refuse to quantify, I guess we'll be off to tribunal.

The ridiculous thing is, that the hours I've quantified are really only a clearer picture of what is outlined in the statement. He needs a meet and greet/organisational session every morning and another after each playtime, as well as a debrief and organisation session at the end of the day. He also needs help to complete his feelings diary three times a day. He is already allocated 45 minutes a week with an ASD teacher and the statement also says he should attend the school's social skills group, which adds up to half an hour of group work, but it also states that he needs 1:1 training in social skills as well. In addition to that it states that he needs 1:1 support with certain specific areas of the curriculum, plus support for specific areas within other subjects and also needs to be able to contact his support person 'at any time of the day' for emotional support.

One of the biggest problems I found was trying to quantifying all the adhoc times that he needs support, as he sometimes needs support to focus and work, but not always and he doesn't need help in every single lesson for every single subject. The SENCO said they deliberately leave the hours flexible for this reason and the SENCOP does make provision for this 'flexibility' but that makes me twitchy as it leaves ds wide open to not being fully supported as and when he needs it.

He is 10 years old, currently in Y5 and had AS and will definitely need his hours upped at Annual Review before he goes to secondary, as he will need support with class to class transition etc. He has also expressed a preference to attend a local MS secondary with his classmates and I will do everything in my power to make that work for him in the first instance.

moosemama that was extremely useful, and if I may, I would like to steal borrow some of your phraseology

Son started off with about 16 hours. School upped it to full-time and fought alongside me to get it upped officially through the Statement. Violence made it quite easy to prove need.

Ben10 sorry missed your message earlier, is your dc coping with no support (don't hit me if it's a sore point )

25 for DS in ms.

DS has needs less than yours and he has 20 hours a week that helped enormously with the transition to secondary.

He needs those hours but does need help getting to lessons, just in lessons and PE. Sounds as if you should push for more hours

DS2 gets 32.5 which covers the full day. We were lucky though and he got his statement while at SS working towards his move to MS.

Iceflower, you're welcome - I've probably snaffled most of it off other MNSN members to be honest,

If you have a copy of the SENCOP, you need to go through it and grab some buzz-words and catch-phrases from there to get into your SA request as well.

My children both get f/t 1:1 My eldest is at secondary. He has 1:1 for each lesson, and all non teaching time. The LA put in some 20odd hours and the school make up the rest from their budget.

My youngest is at primary, he goes to secondary this september. He also has full time 1:1 - apart from if he goes offsite for any reason, eg a trip, then he is 2:1 . His LA funded hours are every teaching hour and the school has to make up the non teaching hours from their budget.

I always tell them all that I don't care which of them pays it, that's not my problem. But my children require 1:1 (minimally) from the moment I hand them over until the moment they hand them back. Who pays for it - they sort out among themselves