Advice on moving areas and out of mainsteam school

[RoxyRobot]

My son was diagnosed with ASD a year ago. He's in year 1. He loved nursery and reception class so we decided to keep him in mainstream education. Still waiting on his SEN.

Year 1 is very different for him and he's already struggling and playing up at home. Already discussed with DH before the idea of moving to Devon (from Yorkshire) to be near family, so if we're moving him to a more specialist school we might as well move areas at the same time.

My questions are:

How would you recommend going about finding a suitable specialist school (we can't afford private so would need to find out about funding)?

Should we wait to get the SEN before we move?

Any other advice appreciated.

Start with the internet to see whether there actually are any specialist schools near where you want to move to, and contact information sources like the NAS. There's also what looks like quite a useful factsheet at www.devon.gov.uk/cypsfactsheets-cwan3-asdresources.pdf.

Has your current local authority agreed to do a statutory assessment? If it hasn't, the statementing process will take at least 6 months, possibly more. On the whole I think it's better to have a statement in place before you move, but it really depends on the attitude of your local authority and whether they're likely to co-operate or not.

We were turned down for his statement the first time because the school didn't get the information in on time. We had to go to the school a few months ago to fill in a huge form but now it's apparently being held up by a local authority department now. They don't seem overly co-operative.

You can't be turned down because the school didn't submit info on time. That's illegal.

I think they had to resubmit the data but apparently it effectively started over again. I'll check with the school though.

How long ago were you turned down, and did they give you notice of your right of appeal? If it was less than two months ago you should appeal to SENDIST. Have a look at the IPSEA and SOS SEN website for more information.

It was over 2 months ago. We naively trusted the school to sort it out. Just learning now to double check everything ourselves.