First meeting with senco - not sure what sort of help to ask for

[FeelsSad]

I have my first meeting with ds2 senco tomorrow to try and get some help for him.
Ds is being assessed for AS and also has had salt assessment -privately- which shows problems at the level of the expressive language.
I know I want a home school book to ease communication.
And he also needs a lot of support social wise. It is clear to me that he wants and tries to communicate with the other kids but fails at it. I am not sure what sort of help they can give. It's a small school. The senco is also a full time teacher and deputy head. I don't expect him to have a lot of time left to implement a lot if things.
What sort of things would you expect school to do to support him?
And finally there is the impact of the language problem on his written work. Again I am not sure what is possible as ds tends to freeze when asked to do things differently. His teacher has tried to have a TA with him for a bit and it made things worse...

Any idea of experience of targets or methods that could help him would be great. At the moment, I feel like I am expected to know what should be implemented as if I was a salt or expert on the field. Whic I am not.

Hi feel and welcome to the board. Firstly, is your son on the special needs register at school? If not then he needs to be, he can be taken off at any time in the future if things improve.

Secondly make a list of all the things you are concerned about and go through each thing and ask the senco what the school can do to support you and your son.
Write down what suggestions he makes and follow it up to make sure it is being done.

Third, make another appointment to see the senco in a month to discuss whether the strategies are helping and what progress your son has made.

Thats what I would do but others might come along with better ideas.

Keep coming on here for support and advice.

Good luck

There is a marvellous resource called Language for Thinking that could be used with your DS individually or in a small group for about 20 mins per session, perhaps 3 times a week? A small start, but a good one to have as a suggestion.

www.winslowresources.com/language-for-thinking.html

I used it as a TA with a DC I supported with AS and my own DS2 used it at his school. It has lots of levels of use, so can be started very basically at you DS's age and can then be reused at a middle level, later, then again at a higher level, later again. It was very easy to implement, I had 1/2 hour run through with the autism advisory teacher.

Does your SENCo have access to any sort of autism advisory teachers or autism outreach resources? Most LAs have something similar. Sometimes a DX of ASD or AS is needed, but in my LA it's just called communication and interaction so no DX needed.

We have what is called 'autism outreach' here but you can only access it if you have a dx.
Good idea re having another meeting on a month. Do you think it's better to see just the senco or to meet with the teacher too? Tomorrow the meeting is with both of them as I felt it was important to have them both on board and agreeing to what we could do.

Thanks for the link. I will have a look at this book and ask if they have heard about it too. That might be a good starting point.

Does anyone know if they can help on a social level too?

There is a social skills scheme called 'circle of friends' where a few well picked role models are grouped maybe weekly to pay some social skills games with your DC and build up a little social network. Make the games lots of fun and it becomes kudos to be included. Off to work now...