Annual Review - we're asking for lots - help!

[LovelyLovelyWine]

Hello again. After some more advice from you knowledgeable lot!

Quick recap: DS is 7 yrs old, AS, possibly PDA (currently pursuing diagnosis) and attends a resourced provision for children with ASC.

We have our DS's Annual Review coming up. We are considering two options:

1. A change of school named in the statement. We are going to visit another resourced provision for ASC which comes highly recommended. It is full but a place may shortly become available.

2. Staying at the current provision for now and seeing how things pan out.

Which ever we decide, we are asking for a full time 1-2-1 TA to be specified in the statement. This is a change, as when we named a specialist ASC provision in his Statement the support was then not specified/quantified - we now need it to be. School and Borough's ASC Advisory teacher agree and will back us up to complex needs panel.

We also want OT named in his Statement. Very hard to come by in our borough, but not impossible. We want regular OT and advice / training for staff.

Two questions:

Re: a 1-2-1 TA. How can I influence who they recruit - can I even do this? We need someone with experience in autism support, but moreover, they need t be a pretty resilient and flexible/creative person, as DS's PDA-like characteristics and very high intelligence / academic ability mean a nice, sweet, mum-who-wants-school-hours is going to badly struggle with him (no offence). The Autism Advisory teacher thought the LA and school would take my opinions seriously, as DS is one of the most 'challenging and complex' children the borough has, but didnt know how likely it would be that we could have it written in to the Statement. She said we could go to Tribunal ans fight them for it if we wanted to, and she did know of parents who had done this in years gone by. But do I need to have this specified - ie. '1-2-1 support, 35 hrs per week, from an individual with X, Y, Z experience'? Is this realistic? Should I be aiming for this? Is it worth it?

Re: OT - again, do you know of anyone who has had OT written into their Statement? What should I be asking for? I have asked for a full sensory assessment, but ideally I would like that followed up with a monthly or bi-monthly session and advice to staff. Does this sound right to you?

Sorry for the essay. I need t write the parent's view for the AR over the weekend , so just want to garner opinions before then.

many thanks if you have read this far!

ds had OT in his statement following an argument and a tribunal so it certainly is possible. I think you can certainly try and specify experience for the TA but be careful as sometimes a TA with experience of ASD might not be suitable for dealing with your ds who might also have PDA. I have also found that sometimes people who do have experience of ASD can be quite rigid in how they think children with ASD should be treated and this then makes them difficult to work with. You are unlikely to be able to influence which TA is recruited for your ds. I was able to do this for dd as they took on her home ABA tutor but this was really because they could see the massive advantage of having someone used to dealing with dd who is also very challenging at times. I think the most you can do having secured 1:1 is to work with the school as closely as possible so that they understand what kind of personality might work best with your ds.

Thanks so much cansu.

That is a really good point re: people with 'autism expertise' and definitely relevant to my DS.

Do you mind me asking how much OT was named in the Statement for your DS? How did you phrase what you were asking for?

Many thanks again

in ds statement it says : 'a sensory integration programme with input from an appropriately qualified occupational therapist and delivery of the programme by school staff during the week. Input from the OT will be on a weekly basis and observed by school staff. ' I took most of the wording for what i wanted from independent ed psych report and OT report in the recommendations part. I was however less fussed by the OT programme in the end or I might have asked for quantification in terms of length of session etc. However Ds had a specialist independent school named in his statement and this was actually the most crucial part IYSWIM. If he had stayed in his LEA ss I would have wanted this bit to be water tight. In some ways making it difficult helped our case as the independent school had its own therapist and it was clearly a major hassle to LEA to get private people in.