Article in tes

[StarlightMcKenzie]

www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6318799&dm_i=14DE%2C19V0Z%2C8XQ7SL%2C4BEBD%2C1

Sensible but spectacularly fails to explain WHAT the children need as opposed to what they don't. And unnecessarily makes a case against specifying hours.

But are your surprised?
Everyone can tell everyoine else what is wrong but when it comes to telling people what they can do to make it right, the place clears.

Raises some excellent points though and well worth a read as a wake up call to all who think a statement and a 1:1 will solve all their childs' problems.

But Moondog, what are parents to do? That is the way the system works. Most of us learn quickly that it s crap and that most people don't know what they're doing but replacing it with support that works is not an easy task. We do not all have access to your type of provision.

I am not actually sure that increasing access to most teachers would necessarily help. Most teachers are bloody clueless about teaching children with complex needs or any needs above what the ' typical' child has.

I haven't read the report itself but that would seem to me to be a key question on it. Would it actually make any difference if these children spent more time in the classroom with an equally clueless teacher? A years worth of teacher training hardly makes you an expert in pedagogy.

Perhaps it is not where child is or who the child is being taught by but what and how child is being taught.

As you know DS's TA is a teacher and this as not necessarily helped, whereas e another TA in school is amazing.

No. it's not easy to chang a system but it is possible.
You keep on and on, demanding accountability and exposing malpractice and worming your way into positions of influence.

I post because in my own small way I know I have managed to make a huge difference to my own child but believe me it has exhausted me and taken over my life.

Tonight my mother came in and watched her following a cake recipe in an adult cookery book with no input from me and said 'I was a married woman before I coudl do that'

In a sweep, hundred of hours sat at my kitchen table going over and over and over things I could not trust others to teach her were worth it.

But Moondog, we are all spending hours or prepared to spend hours trying to make a huge difference to our children but there is no easy answer in most cases as you can see from my posts.

I am doing my best and I know that unless I do it, no one will do. But that doesn't mean I know what to do.

This kind of plays back to what I was trying to get at last week - I read here again and again "for my dc, I am seeking a dx/statement/1:1..." but how does that seemingly intangible thing actually translate into concrete support?

Your child can have a statement - if it is not actually being followed effectively, it is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Your child can have a dx - but we have seen here that words on a paper do not mean effective support in all cases. In the same breath, if you have met one child with autism, you have met one child with autism - a child with ASD is as different from another child with ASD as one NT child is different from another. The dx doesn't equate automatically to effective management of challenging behaviours or educational struggles.

Your child can have 1:1, but unless the support being provided is consistent, effective and appropriate, they are just filling space.

However, with SMART goals (both in school and at home) success can be realized in all children. If you don't know what to do with them, by asking specific questions of the professionals in their lives, or through personal research you can at least find things to try. They may work, they may not, but they will always teach you something about your child - a lesson you can't get anywhere but by lots and lots of interaction.

Trouble is, even a deeply flawed mainstream education often gives kids a better chance than some of our so-called special schools (aka pre-18 child-minding service)

Great points Beemom.

I agree, really good points Beemom.

e.g. my dd2 struggles big time to access the language used in KS2 text. It's all inference, dialogue, plots, literary style (which to my dd means 'missing words') and no pictures. She can't access these texts at all.

So... school have agreed to send home accessible texts for her. She has no problem with these, they do not represent a challenge. Last night she read a fictional tale about wolves. The sort of thing she would have been given to read two years ago. Lots of pictures. Simple language. She read it from cover to cover. What higher language there was did not detract from the text. e.g. the wolves approach their prey in single file what's that? Who cares? Does it matter? No! If we stopped to mull it over I would have got short shrift. So we moved on. She enjoyed the book and the 'single file' bit went by the wayside.

All well and good.

But the bottom line is: this is NOT an intervention in improving dd2's reading comprehension. It is simply avoiding the higher level language which she struggles with. The only way to tackle it is to have someone sit down for 45 minutes and drill down into the meaning and develop her understanding of more complicated language. Nobody at school is ever going to have the time or skill to do this, no teacher, no TA, no SENCo. That's why we have to go back to our SaLT.

I think intervention (from schools or anywhere) is as much about knowing your limitations as anything else.

More really excellent points Handy and so true.Most 'interventions' avoid the issue (circle the lake in my analaogy).
Few tackle the issue (dive into the damned lake)

All well and good and who would disagree with the need for effective support rather than just a 1:1 on a bit of paper.

However, while the need for effective interventions and measurable outcomes is self-evident, achieving them is not always easy particularly if neither schools or professionals know what to do about a particular issue.

That is a far from uncommon situation and pretending we could have all the answers if we just tried harder or commited time to our child or just did it ourselves is fallacious, dismissive and a bit patronising.

It might be straightforward with more tangible problems like reading and writing or difficult behaviour issues people can see but other issues are not so clear cut.

I have given extensively of time at home and at school to the detriment of my own career. I look for my own answers as professionals haven't a clue. Sometimes, I can figure out what to do and can work on things myself and get school to as well. Other times, there is no easy solution.

I know Moondog, you will say you would work it out but you are not here and no one here as that confidence or perhaps skill. The ABA therapists I have tried, although highly qualified and well-known, haven't a clue how to teach with teaching skills to children with Asperger's either.

So, yes, of course targets should be SMART and support should be effective and we shouldn't waste time on things that don't work etc etc but saying that is not the same as working out a concrete plan of what needs to be done and how.

No but a good starting place is to
a.) insist on SMART targets
b.) ask for the evidence that a particular approach is effective

All teachers and therapists are under increasing pressure to ensure that this is the case. All of their professional bodies cite this explicitly. The focus for example of the official s/lt magazine on EBP and outcomes is heartening. A tenacious and courteous insistence on this gets one quite far down the line.

I would not like anynoe to think it is easy. I could list a whole manner of ways in which fighting for my child's rights has had a huge impact on my life in may ways-professionally and personally, but I am not posting to speak extensively about my own experiences.

I agree Moondog but my problem is that, although I often end up making the targets SMART myself, I don't know how to progress this or how we should be targetting this in school.

Take non-verbal communication. I am trying my best to work on this but all SLTs seem to have little idea how to build concrete skills.

DS is very sensitive to being made to look different.

It is not straightforward.

No it's not and I would not presume to sit here and to tell people over the Internet that it is all easy. It's not. It's like wading through porridge. But all I can do is to say that it is possible and people will listen and that when you show them how, people are more than happy to work in precise measurable fashion.

School staff, with very rare exceptions are not bad people. They are poorly trained in helping kids with SEN and they have two choices, which are either to admit they are clueless or to pretend that they know what they are doing and to get defensive when questioned, mainly because they are frightened and utterly out of their depth.

The main problem with that article, is that it is written by the status quo peeps, and quoting the goverment Lacky IOE.

That means the focus is likely to be about justifying the removal of TAs from the classroom (in line with current attempts at decreasing staff:child ratios in nurseries), rather than to support an initiative to train them better.

Star I have just read the article and I think you have hit the nail on the head.
It is definitely humming the tune of 'TA's dont work, let's remove them'. Without analysing that the problem is one of untrained people being expected to be miracle workers with individual children.

If I struggle with my SN child, if we acknowledge that one ASD child is not the same as the next, how fair is it to expect the average TA to fill the gap?
Most will do their best, but that is often unsupported by the CT, little access to the child's S/LT, OT etc.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Other than supporting a partnership approach between the Education sector, the SN sector and the parents, with power resting mainly with the parents rather than the fund holders.
Power generally follows the money, so parents as purchasers anyone?

Yes. Which is why we'll never get them.

I have them for SLT and I'm now trying to get them for OT

To spend on alternative schools whole package perhaps, but never to let a parent spy into the classroom.

Apart from anything else they woukd expose the fact that the money isn't being spent entirely on the child and the TA isn't solely working with that child. It woukd cost too much.

But the LA's who are even attempting the pathfinders have carefully selected their families. No way would any of them have picked me.

Star - they wouldn't have picked me either! We had to force them by threat of judicial review.

Legal aid in the child's name is available.