Parental Views - SA

[Dev9aug]

LEA have decided to access and I have to submit parental views in support of my application. Can anybody share with me what kind of things I can add.

So far I have added list of his difficulties and our views etc.

DS is on an ABA program which the LEA know about. Do I need to add bits about his progress as well?

Yes. You need to show great progress, show clearly that it was the ABA that achieved that, and you also have to show how far he still has to go.

Whatever has been submitted before. If you want it in, has to be submitted again, as this is now the 'official' part A that you are writing.

Thanks Star.

I will send you mine if you PM me email?

Make sure you include everything. I was told that Tribunal's don't like hidden surprises from parents. So if you end at Tribunal, your historic Views will already have everything from you so there'll be no new concerns for a Tribunal to consider.

Thanks Sickofsocalledexperts, I will pm you now.

TOWIELA Thanks, We are planning to do just that. The LEA have copies of every report we have.

One more question, Do we have to specify what we want from them as well in the parental views or does that come later?

You don't have to specify what you want as really the whole assessment needs to be done before you specify the provision to meet need. However, assuming you already have quite a bit of detail about need, you'd be sensible if requesting ABA, to get the key terms into your views. The ones that cannot be argued with.

So. DS has made exceptional progress on his ABA programme. The success of this approach has been the detailed use of evidence-based-practice adjusted on a moment-by-moment basis to ensure that every moment of his learning is optimal, and that his progress is continually measured on a daily basis. Given the progress made so far, this would be the fastest route to ds potential to becoming as independent as possible and we would expect this intervention if continued to focus and build on ds' potential to integrate and become an effective group-learner.

Or some other such blurb.

Be careful in your wording. You can say that ABA has been effective, but you don't need to say that you want ABA. You can include all the attributes of ABA so that the only way to fulfil the requirements of the statement is to deliver ABA, but some LAs might be more likely to fund it if it is called Early Start Denver Model, or Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention, or if they want to call it 'Autism Advisory Special Service', but you absolutely have to make sure that the fundamental aspects of ABA are detailed in the statement.

Data-driven Evidence-Based-Practice is very difficult to argue with.

Thanks Star, that is very helpful.

Because my LA refused to assess, I had to get 4 indie reports to support my first appeal (LA conceded weeks before Tribunal for refusal to assess).

So when they finally did assess, in my Views, I quoted very specifically from these reports because I already had so much evidence of what had worked and what hadn't. I ended up with about 11 full pages of very detailed Views

Although my 11 page document become an appendix to the Statement, my LA included about 2 lines from it into part 2 of the Final Statement (anybody else reading part 2 wouldn't have thought I was concerned at all!). During appeal, I crossed out those 2 lines and rewrote it so now part 2 contains nearly a full page of very very specific views & concerns.

I felt that this was the only opportunity when the LA would HAVE to listen to me - so I give it full strength.

I'm pleased I did because it's now all in part 2 and isn't an appendix which the LA could 'forget' to send to their named school (which they did - along with 8 or so other reports).