Fed up of mindfuck LA, self-serving meetings, professional liars

[donburi]

Just venting. There is this march in London on Saturday all about saving local jobs in the public sector. As the child of socialist parents, I can't believe that I am thinking along the lines of: 'Sack 'em all, they have fucked around with my ASD child, my family life, my finances - I cannot recall a single, positive moment since DS' birth when I have felt proud or grateful in relation to my LA.

The woolly statement I now have in my hand has hardly redeemed them. When I was struggling to pay for private interventions, they accused me of pushing out their crap services and that it was a child protection issue. Now that I am asking them to put their money where their mouth is, all of a sudden, the bank is closed, DS is 'making progress' (obv untrue). Their corrupt mindfuck is all about communicating that they are right either way and all of the time.

They turned up to my sons paed appointment in force citing CAF even though I never invited them, making their little notes to help them gain an advantage over me if it goes to tribunal.

They have magicked up this appointment with ASD outreach which they could have done years ago when he was a lot more severe if it was out of genuine concern for him rather than lining up potential tribunal witnesses.

I do not think they can be out-crapped at LA level and I really wish they knew how little faith we have in them and how goddam awful they really are.

*Hothead" - I think this board is somewhere 'safe' where people can say what they feel. This is particularly important when, in the 'real' world, some people can be so lacking in understanding of our experiences - whether through genuine ignorance or lack of care.

Agnes uses strong language but her experience devastated her family and as a sensible, articulate, legal professional, it destroyed her faith and trust in those supposed to be supporting her family. I can understand her sentiments and I have seen some of what she experienced and it is beyond belief.

I am very pleased that your experiences have been more positive and I am glad that your LA was reasonable. It is important to point out good experiences and share them.

However, many on this board have had, through no fault of their own, very poor experiences which few will understand in 'real life'.

We understand here though and I, for one, do not see it as my place or my right to tell others how they should express their anger, and their grief, at what they have experienced.

ilikemysleep I am enormously heartened to hear what you say and I wholeheartedly agree that some independent professionals are just as likely to make broad sweeping judgments because they think that is what parents are paying for. Parents are usually just wanting the truth, however, and it is sad that there is so little trust in the system.

However, my own experience has been of an EP trying to see my child without my consent and also of another EP being drafted in for a Tribunal hearing because she was an ASD specialist even though she had never met my child and had no intention of supporting him or working with him. That is not about money, it is about ethics.

i have a very supportive school who have done everything they can to support my son and i will always be grateful to them for that. the lea however is different. my school say- we cannot meet this childs needs but rather than supporting this they send in their own lea officers to deliberately write reports that are simply untrue purely to try and give them some evidence at the tribunal. i did commision our own OT report as the LA never did, the LA the reject it and say 'we will get our own' which they have done and it has come back even worse than our report! so now the lea are in a very tricky position as the only person who is a lone voice saying our son is 'okay' is one of their employees - even their own 'independant' report agrees with us - this is what makes parents upset - that our children are pawns in a game. i have indeed met some very good EP along the way. it frustrates me that our current EP who i have alot of respect for came in and did a report on our son 6 months ago and his recommendations were ignored by his own LEA. parents have to deal with this and it can becoming draining. i know that the LEA may call the EP to tribunal which is crazy when they dont even accept his findings although i have heard on the grapevine that the EP has now left which i sincerely hope isnt true as my son really liked him!

I can't make sweeping generalisations about all EPs, but I can about all EPs in my previous LA. This is because they only recruited the ones that did as they were told. Having said that I'm not certain if they were obstructive deliberately or had just fallen foul of the brainwashing and 'culture' of that LA.

Professionals tend to believe professionals over parents. If an EP has been told by a colleague that a parent is trouble, demandng more than she is entitled, claiming DLA fraudulently, been banned from MN for spreading SEN propaganda, records meetings secretly and is overstating her ds' needs, then that is going to influence the EPs perception of her ds in the very limited time that is available for assessment and observation. Particularly if that assessment happens within a school who the parents going to tribunal to prove cannot meet the child's needs, and who have also been told terrible things about the family.

LA EPs do not work in a vacuum. They work in a political context.

for the record, I have never had an EP state that my ds MUST be educated in a particular school, only suggest one that might fulfil the needs as have been assessed.

I have experienced both. A truly fantastic EP, really cared about my ds and worked hard to support him, even finding ways to extend her 1:1 involvement beyond the standard block they are allowed. She also did his SA and again was thorough and honest about his needs.

Ds also has an amazing inclusion teacher, but she is now overstretched far beyond what is reasonable and simply can't give him the support he needs as a result.

We have had some incredible teachers, totally committed to supporting all the children in their class and able to be naturally inclusive and differentiate as required without being told.

Our LA is a mix though and it really depends on what is going on internally as to the response you get. They have deliberately mislead me on changes they said had been made but did not appear in the final statement, petty wording stuff that it really wouldn't have been a problem for them to change but has left the school able to make choices rather than give ds simple, basic support that would cost nothing (extra time and access to ICT which they've already admitted they have available but seem reluctant to give him). They also allowed the school to make changes to the statement after we had signed to say we were happy with it and wanted to finalise and told us they can do whatever they want and we don't get a say. This was despite the statement being at our request, not the schools.

However, having seen the outcome of the statement they produced and having spoken to me on the phone this week when I was so upset at the state ds is in that I couldn't stop myself crying they totally backed me up and agreed the school has to pull it's finger out and implement the statement as it was written, not just how they see fit and that they shouldn't just deliberately misintepret it to suit their own resourcing issues - any interpretation should be for his benefit, not theirs.

With the LA officer, I think she is caught between a rock and a hard place. She does seem to genuinely care, but she's under pressure from both the LA and the schools. She is not a specialist in SENs and doesn't always fully understand the implications of the amendments she refuses. To her they seem simple semantics and she honestly trusts the school to want to do the best for it's pupils and therefore finds it hard to accept that there are dishonest manipulative SENCOs out there who genuinely care more about budgets than children. She also uses the standard delaying tactics etc, because it saves the LA money if they don't have to implement the statement straight away and she honestly doesn't get how badly this affects the child concerned.

I wouldn't use blanket statements, because it's far more complicated than that. There's good and bad in all things and this is no different. As I said on the other thread, a lot of the issues are down to the political, social and financial environment/culture of the time. The problems are far wider reaching than just SEN provision and support and this is unfortunately just another casualty in a royally effed up country/world.

For those whom have had a good experience then I think you were lucky, the norm tends to be a system of lies, cover ups, banding together mentality, failures and accusations of parents "unreasonable" behaviour.

Those professionals that are decent and honest, then personally I think you are a rarity ( I don't mean this to sound rude) as the story I hear is the the same all over.

I was just chatting with my sister who has a Speech and language impairment, the EP went as far as telling my sis that she would not get a statement because her 6 year old son was not 4 years behind ( he is 3 years behind) and she basically wrote up a wishy washy report saying everything was more or less ok...the lea SLT was more on the ball and initially said he needed xxx support which in theory could Only really be met In a specialist setting, my sister also had a very detailed ican assessment t which the lea SLT agreed with, they recently sent the finalised statement and there is nothing specified or quantified in relation to his SLT needs when my sister asked why, the SLT suddenly changed her tune and did not want to get involved, and refusing to specify how much help he needed?!? We are convinced she was pressurised to not do this as it makes no sense that being his primary need is SLCN she does not want to "get involved"

I personally have emails from the LEA to my sons SLT telling her what to write in a report...she has a duty to my son not the LEA and should not be falsifying her report to fit in with the lea wants...needless to say I will be opening a HPC complaint against her alongside the other one who decided to not keep any notes of my sons provision or progress in the 1.5 years of weekly work with him.

Trouble is we need to simplify stuff in order for our brains to cope with it - well I do anyway. And it is complicated and it isn't in their interests to make it simple.

I think that many 'professionals' don't believe how dire things are for families. It took almost 2 years for my family (mostly teachers) to stop criticising me for my 'challenge' to their profession.

Now they have seen the light and are appalled at the behaviour of their colleagues and ashamed at their recognition at having allowed such behaviour to prevail within their own careers.

Out of curiousity, why do people that work in the SEN team usually appear to have no idea about SEN or some small knowledge in say autisim, SLT, etc...I would have thought this would help???

I know my sons caseworkers (past and present) have no idea from the conversations we have had.

I think you're right Star. Our LA officer genuinely had a lot of misplaced faith in our SENCO, she just couldn't accept that they wouldn't want what was best for ds and kept telling me no-one else had complained about them. I explained this isn't because she hasn't done anything wrong, it's because she is very clever and extremely persuasive, which means you come out of meetings having agreed to the polar opposite of what you went in for. She started to believe me after I told her I have started taking PP with me and the rep came out of the first meeting with said SENCO and said she totally understood why I couldn't go alone and what a piece of work the SENCO is.

I know personally of other parents in the school who have put up with her rather than complain to the LA, because they don't want to be labelled vexatious, even when she has gone as far failing to make building alterations for the whole of an academic year, for which the LA had already supplied the funds. The result of them not making those alterations had serious implications for the child whose statement the funds came from and what did the SENCO do? She suddenly decided he had learning difficulties that were too serious for the school to manage and tried to get him shoved out. Parents got independent reports that proved not only does he not have any LDs at all, he is actually highly able - he just has physical disabilities that they need to overcome in order for him to demonstrate it. Once she had been shot down in flames, she cobbled together an approximation of the building alterations that should have been done a year earlier, but had it done much more cheaply and not wholly adequately to meet the child's needs.

At one point the LA officer told me that my problem with the school was down to my own trust issues. She is now starting to see it from the other side.

Whether or not the LA will back me up when/if the school fail to come up with the goods at our forthcoming meeting remains to be seen. It's easy to be sympathetic, it's another thing entirely to put your money where your mouth is.

'I wonder if DPs come in for education if that will make a difference'

I don't think so, as Local Authorities currently appear to be able to set the terms for when DPs are allowed due to their monitoring role and supposed accountability role. They also tend to believe that only 'professionals' should be able to arrange provision to defend vulnerable parents from cowboys (and keep themselves in jobs of course).

" This is because they only recruited the ones that did as they were told. Having said that I'm not certain if they were obstructive deliberately or had just fallen foul of the brainwashing and 'culture' of that LA."

This is spot-on. I have experienced at first hand a newly recruited EP joining the LA full of genuine concern for the children who is a well-controlled LA puppet one year on and very much dictated to by the bully-girl SENCO who appears to run every department involved in DS' life.
It is the ugly way multi-disciplinary working operates in reality. It is never as good or useful as they would have us believe. It allows the pushy, obnoxious staff to rule the roost while the others kow-tow to them by promoting their 'caring qualities' and professionalism even if it compromises their own professionalism in the process.

It is such a shame that our culture has drifted firmly into multi-discipling absolutely everything. Back in the day, professionals were hardly islands though managed to retain enough integrity to have faith in their own judgements, not the most popular judgement on the table.

The CAF system is the jewel in the crown of this dreadful MD working procedure and obv a thorn in the side of many a family with SN children. It accounts for a major part of the fat and slack which needs to be sucked out of the public sector before my faith in it is restored to any degree.

I haven't read the whole thread, but just want to apologise - I would not usually have posted like this, the 'mindfuck' & other comments made me think it was a venting thread where it was ok to let rip more than usual.

Having said that I can provide numerous official documents from my LA about the 'burden' of autistic children which is actually exactly the same phrase Hitler used on his euthanasia posters. I have been personally told my child is a burden.

My LA has gone out of its way to ignore advice from its own EP to ensure my son was placed in a cheaper place than they knew he needed, it was very very blatant and deliberate in our case to make my son fail for 2 years to save the cost of the placement the LA had been firmly told he needed.

I could sue them for negligence and know I would win but would have to risk my house to fund it

I don't actually believe there is not enough money tbh. If there isn't enough money then everyone should at least be honest about it and MPs should be happy to go on tv and say society can't afford these kids and won't be paying for what they need. It costs £1 million to keep a very premature baby in special care alive for the first year - more than a child with autism would need for high quality support over their lifetime. I don't really understand why society accepts the cost of the first but moans about budgets when it comes to the second. I don't begrudge spending it on either.

I was just drawing the parallel that Hitler considered disabled people a burden on society and we don't seem to have moved very far on from that view. Not where I live anyway.

I would say that the proportion of happy vs unhappy posters provides a balanced picture tbh. If we don't get to let it out on a SN thread than where else ..I can assure you that friends with NT children, even well meaning ones, cannot possibly imagine how we feel.
Attending MS education and seeing the NT babies flourish and turn into socially responsible, eloquent little people who can cope better than your DS who is twice their age creates a massive sense on injustice when - like their parents - you have done everything 'right' but fall within the 'problem category' because your child does not fit into their big jigsaw. Despite your initial faith in the LA and efforts to be proactive, their system is designed to gradually fade out on your child and freeze you out in a way which ensures that your Dc are unlikely to ever realise their full potential.

I did say with two exceptions! Not everyone in the system. we have a nice EP and a nice SW.
Our LA EP has put his neck on the line over ABA
which I guess was why I was was so shocked when he was deliberately ignored. The SEN officer tried to get the EP removed from the case in favour of a less sympathetic one
Thats the sort of thing I was venting about - the stuff that crosses a line from managing a budget to blatant breaking of the law and ethical boundaries. When they forget this is not a game of tactics but a child's life
But yes I will try and vent more privately in future

Why should you Agnes?
Say what you damn well please.
Expressing your opinion is your right, without worrying about the sensibilities of one or two people.
I find it hugely illuminating and depressing to learn what low opinions people have of the SEN industry, an industry which exists largely to become ever more bloated, self congratulatory and self serving.

I am ashamed to be part of it myself althoguh of course there are many good people within it.
If I started recounting how grotesquely I too have been lied to, fobbed off, threatened and harassed with regard to my own child's needs I'd be here all night.
Resolved finally but not without taking a huge toll on us all.