How helpful has a statement been for your child?

[Walter4]

I am trying to decide if a statement is going to help my son. I can see that it might be needed if he was in an environment he could not cope with school wise. He is not yet 5 so looking ahead. However if that meant TA for him alone, I feel he'd hate that. If it meant I'd get him the special school he might need, I can see that being helpful. My son has PDA and at the moment I can see every type of schooling I think of having problems. The best scenario I feel might be part time school and part home schooling and I can't see a statement being useful there.
I probably sound confused....I am, very! :)

A statement states his needs and the provision required to meet those needs. So he might need a TA with a particular experience or qualification in PDA that enables her to know just when to step in or step back, or he might need a part-time school placement (almost impossible without a statement). He might need 'Communication Therapy' delivered by a SALT, or OT to help him with strategies to help him cope when is internal state makes him anxious.

He might need to be allowed to play on the computer at lunch time for a bit of it rather than roam around the playground lost

etc etc.

BUT, just because you have a statement, doesn't make the quality of provision necessarily any good. You can have SALT written in but a drip of a SALT who can't engage your ds.

You can have TA support written in, but the teacher might decide that since you never see inside the classroom, she can use that TA for the more disruptive children and sit your child in the corner with a piece of blu tac to keep him quiet.

You can have part-time school written in but this can make LAs uncomfortable and subject you to a review every fortnight to plan the full-time transition.

It's all such a lottery.

However, all things being equal, statements are getting increasingly difficult to get, and better now than later, as it is at least possible that your child will need extra time in exams or support to attend further education.

Hugely helpful. He has asd. We get full time ABA programme with private provider and they go with him to school. He goes to mainstream primary parttime. With aba he can access school, mix with children and apply skills to a more real world challenging environment than home but his main learning is out of school. A benefit of aba has been specialist knowledge behaviour approaches and consistent boundaries which flows across all settings. The problem is you have to try and fail mainstream approaches usually first before you get the tailor made provision we get. As a parent that's a bitter pill to swallow.

Yes. That's the thing. It's very rare that a child will get a 'helpful' statement for simply asking.

The helpful ones cost money and risk egos of those delivering the generic or who have only had poor inadequate training and don't know any better.

My son is now at secondary and has had a statement for the vast majority of his school career. He does not have a full time TA but is helped for some subjects (shadow support and the TA helps others).

Its the best thing I could have done for him. It has brought with it more overall support and importantly understanding from teachers.

Walter 4 - My son is 3, almost 4 and we have just applied for a SA. He has no dx, we have managed to get a cancellation with the community paed tomorrow after a long wait so that process is hopefully to start now. I think my son has aspergers to some degree aswell as PDA. I would be interested to chat about PDA as it seems to be much rarer than asd :) Btw I want a statement so we can try to enforce getting the best tailored support for our son at school.

Agnes if you don't mind me asking how did you get to receive ABA? Did you ask for it?

We were told at a meeting on Tuesday (by the chap who is writing my sons statements) that the school can effectively pick and choose which bits of the statement to follow as they are meant to be a long range plans. We and school were a bit . So no my hopes on the helpfulness of the statements are fading fast.

'We were told at a meeting on Tuesday (by the chap who is writing my sons statements) that the school can effectively pick and choose which bits of the statement to follow as they are meant to be a long range plans'

Get his name. Write to him to clarify that a)he is the person with the responsibility for writing statements and b)that he has told you that the school can pick and choose what they want from the statement.

Then sit back and wait for the backtracking grovelling letter, which you will be able to use regularly for leverage if you have any doubts in the future that the statement is being followed.

OneinEight

What this LEA bod gave you was duff information and ignorance of the law on their part is no excuse because they know the laws. School cannot pick and choose what to follow or not in it because they are meant to be long range plans, support has to be both quantified and qualified. No wonder the school were meh about what he said.

I would have a bloody good read of this statement when it arrives as Parts 2 and 3 need to be both specified and quantified in terms of support. If it is not you need to reject it, it may well then turn into a SEND tribunal situation.

www.ipsea.org.uk is a good website generally speaking.

Also what Starlight wrote as well.

I am absolutely terrified because ds1 is going to secondary school in September.
However, if he didn't have a statement I don't think I'd be sending him at all. He will have full time 1:1, but that will be within main classes and I can't imagine he'd be safe without it. He is so vulnerable. If it goes tits up I have the option of the excellent special schools. Ds1 wants to go to this school so we will try, but I have back up.
If you don't have it you have no back up.

Aika we got it the hard way. We paid privately for training and supervision and worked with our son at home ourselves for a year (giving up income to do so) (from age 3-4). We showed good progress. At the same time we continued to send him part-time to his mainstream private nursery which was receiving the typical LA ASD support of visits from speech therapy and autism outreach while we applied and appealed for a statement. We had to appeal twice as they refused to assess and then against the statement issued. We were able to show nursery achieved zero progress over a year in fact in some areas at nursery he was going backwards. We then compared this to the documented progress we had achieved at home with ABA. The LA fought us every step. It is absolutely worth it but I wont pretend it was easy. We live in a very anti ABA authority. Our plan if we lost was to move 10 miles to an authority which does compromise about aba. So it very much depends where you live.

In the past people have done info requests on ABA by local authority on www.whatdotheyknow.com if you type in applied behaviour analysis and your council it should come up

Thanks everyone, been a dreadful couple of days ,my brains turned to mush couldn't think straight enough to produce a comment!

I'm trying to work out if I should plan a programe of part home school and part school. I feel if I put him in a small school with under 15 in a class and limit the amount of time he needs to deal with this environment with home schooling too, then he may not need the support a statement gives him ie a TA ? I often hear its a fight to get a good one and even then they are spread through the class. I feel PDA. Needs such a different approach I'm loathed to trust him to a TA all day. I feel it will ultimately create more problems than it might solve.

Thanks hothead, I just can't see my PDA son tolerating aTA , he wants to be like the others , but I know wouldn't be able to handle it, thus my individual idea of schooling for him. Part small school , part home? No support .

I think with PDA you probably do need a statement and a really well written one at that, as it's so important to make sure that all the staff that work with your dc have a very clear understanding of his needs.

With my ds it was his passport to indi SS which now is the only placement he could cope with, but if he'd had a statement earlier and his mainstream school had understood his needs, things may have turned out differently for him and he may have been able to cope with mainstream.

Hi hot head and corny. I am starting to think that way too. I just struggle to see my son in a huge school with 30 children in a class, with or without a TA. I also struggle to see him learning much in that environment, how have you're children done, learning wise? I want to have a happy emotionally secure child above all else...we all do I'm sure.

Hothead, I met with the senco at a mainstream school this week and she said that it was my parental right to part school part home educate my son if I so wished? I was surprised at this , but pleased. Do you think this is not the case?