A new thread to avoid hijacking Claw's - That urge to pull them out of school

[lougle]

I have it hugely with DD2.

Today DD3 found a frog and DD2 said 'Mummy do we have a book about frogs because I want to know what's inside a frog but I can't see inside its head or its tummy?....' So, I quickly googled a picture of a frog's anatomy and printed it out for her. A few minutes later she came back with the picture and she'd written 'The frog - tongue, eyes, feet' on the top.

Then, she came to me about half-an-hour later and whispered 'Mummy, do you have a picture of a chicken like the frog one with the picture of the things that might be inside its head and its tummy?'

She was more animated about this than I've ever seen her about school...

I am feeling the same but ds2 is 14 now , i didnt have any idea he had asd until he started high school at 11 . its been 3 years of misery and i feel i have failed him as far as school is concerned . I still dont have the answer as to what i should do

Lougle at always sitting on the FB

My ds came out of school at the start of Y5 (he's nearly 15 now, and thriving). It was hard to get him to accept at first as he thought he enjoyed school and had friends, but what he really had was a group of people who struggled to tolerate him and quite a few more who actively bullied him. As others have said, teachers' 'help' came in the form of insisting nothing was wrong so that I 'wouldn't worry', rather than dealing with the problems directly. In truth, ds had no friends at all and was utterly miserable - he'd just been brainwashed into thinking that school was a happy place and that he too was happy, which is easy to do with a child who has limited emotional understanding.

I found it increasingly difficult, as he progressed through primary school, to engage him with social activities after hours. When he was younger (5, 6, 7 years) it was easier as the school stress wasn't so great, but as time got on he could cope with far less in the evenings and we spent all his out of school time dealing with meltdowns and preparing to send him back the next day. So socially he was making no progress whatsoever, and in fact was deteriorating quite rapidly in some respects.

It's an enormous decision to pull away from school and a lot of factors have to be considered. I too have chronic health problems and it makes HE very challenging at times, but I was 'fortunate' to be already on long-term sickness at the time that ds was deregistered so I didn't have a job to leave or arrangements to change, just slight adaptations. But even so, he was suffering so much I wouldn't have hesitated whatever the conditions. HE has cost us an absolute fortune but we've cut our cloth accordingly and it's been worth every penny.

I know now that ds would have sunk without trace if I'd left him in school, and given that his stress response was to lash out at everyone around him he could well have been on track to time in prison for assault. The system isn't geared to support children like him, despite its fervent claims to the contrary. In fact, many of the professionals who were nominally involved in ds's case whilst he was at school have since admitted to me that mainstream school is no place for children with autism, but they are required by procedure to convince us that they work.

I'm so grateful that you are being so honest with your HE experiences. I feel at times the world is so polarised, with one group of people saying 'schools are the work of the devil' and another group saying 'get with the program - kids have to go to school to learn to fit in society.'

I'm going to give it time. She's not in crisis, right now. I'll give her teacher a few weeks to get to know her, then talk to her.

Lougle, I totally agree about the polarised camps. And I think (based on not that much evidence, tbh) that some of the people in the 'HE is the only way' camp have NT children, which might be ... easier? Less fraught with concern about whether they are getting what they need.

I agree that the system isn't geared to support some children, but to be fair sometimes all the good will and effort (and there is pitifully little of either) won't help a true square peg. The bits that you'd have to saw off to fit in that round hole are too important

Absolutely.

It's a logistic impossibility to meet the needs of EVERY child in a class of 30, with one teacher and a TA, even if the child has 1-1 support, and even if the school is striving to do its absolute best to do so. Schools need uniformity just to get through the day, so it makes sense for them to expect (and aim for) all children to function the same way and achieve at similar levels. It's just not in line with reality though. The amount of damage that's done to children like ours in an effort to make them conform is simply unforgivable.

I agree too with what's been said about polarised views. We all form our opinions (I think) based around what's true for our own experience, but I believe that to a degree it comes down to luck. Your children fit in at school and are doing well? Luck. Home ed works for you with minimal effort? Exceptional luck to have well-motivated kids. Your head teacher is crap and arsey? Also luck. It doesn't mean that other people's situations should be as easy or difficult as one's own, in similar circumstances. I stay away from some of the HE forums specifically to avoid this kind of pressure .

Lots of HE people are keen on unschooling.

If you have NT children, then unschooling I can see totally working. Life is generally geared to the NT, so getting them to take part in life will generally give them what they need (again, horrible generalisations, but am trying to figure out my own thoughts and underlying philosophies).

But for non-NT, getting them to take part in life IS THE PROBLEM. Most of life is not generally geared to the non-NT. So unschooling can't just work like for NT, and mainstream school can't work for the reasons stated here.

"But for non-NT, getting them to take part in life IS THE PROBLEM. Most of life is not generally geared to the non-NT."

True, but I explained it to DH like this:

If the thing you find hardest in the world is to sit in a room on your own, reading paperwork, imagine having to do that for 30 hours per week. You'd find it easier if you could do some social stuff, then a bit of paperwork, then some more social stuff, etc.

Now, imagine that the thing you find hardest is having to spend time with lots of people. Imagine having to do that for 30 hours per week. You'd find it easier to have 'down times' then times where you spend an hour or two practicing your social skills.

For children like DD2, the 'hard work' is not the actual 'work'. It's the conforming to the expectations of school.

For example, she doesn't like phonics. Not because it's hard (she's quite good at it). Not because it's boring. Because she 'has to get up and then sit down and get up and sit down again.' It's that constant flux of activity that she really really struggles with.

We have just had a brief dabble in the water with home-schooling as I withdrew ds2 from school as he clearly wasn't coping and its taken a while to find another placement. It definitely would be harder than I optimistically thought (I) Because I find it very difficult to motivate ds2 into doing anything let alone work (he will do maths but anything involving writing is a major turn off) and (2) Because he withdrew even more than he had already to the point where getting him out of the house is a major issue. The latter did surprise me as I thought he would become less anxious without the pressure of school. As a caveat he did know all the way along that we would try and find a new school so always had that worry and I hadn't really got a plan in my mind as to how to go about the home-schooling as was not a well thought decision to take him out of school.

zzzz and lougle I'm DELIGHTED to hear what you say about unschooling or student-led learning. I really wasn't trying to say it can't work (though I do realise those were my actual words . )...I was sort of trying to figure out the principles. And what you have said has made it much clearer. Sorry if I sounded dogmatic.

Although obviously all of this depends on your individual child and you.

And I do really worry about us never having a break from each other. Not to sound trivial, but when do I go for a hospital appointment or a smear test or a hair cut?

HE is such a positive option for children with autism (and similar) because you can dispense with all the irrelevant faff that goes on in schools and work out a tailor-made, 1-1 programme that meets the individual child's specific needs, something that even the best of specialist settings struggles to achieve. Nobody can function, let alone thrive, when they're constantly stressed to the max - with HE that stress can be reduced then difficult situations can be introduced gradually when they're ready, to prepare for the wider world. Schools generally want to rush things and move on to the next target way too soon.

We reduced ds's 'education' to a handful of relevant subjects, but still dipping into others occasionally to acknowledge their existence, but the vast proportion of time is spent with real-life social development and - most importantly - having FUN and enjoying life. As a result he's doing amazingly well - it's definitely been the right choice for us.

BUT I'm still glad that he did go to school initially, because it gave me the opportunity to examine his coping ability in that 'normal' setting and to recognise his differences. I think if he'd been HEd from the start it would have taken much longer, if at all, to get his autism/ADHD diagnoses. Yes, those issues are still very much present but considerably more manageable in HE than they could have been in school.

zzzzz - I too find it a lot easier to HE than to send ds to school - we had no life at all in those days and I was in constant battle with the authorities. It was a blessing when we were finally left on our own to get on with what worked, without interference from folk who thought they knew better. Plus, because we can be more flexible about his learning, we can take a day off if things aren't right and come back to things when they are. It means he has more successes and is happier for it.

Another SEN He’dder that doesn’t quite fit in different camps.

Unfortunately those who are in camps split further into more camps in later years, including in home ed and in further ed, and in the end you learn to take from each what is of use to you and yours, and let the rest go over your head as best you can.

I’d suggest the most important thing re the urge to pull them out, (or put them in) at any level, is to remember that it honestly doesn’t have to be the bridge burning exercise that parents are often made to feel it might be.

There is huge pressure to do the ‘right’ thing as if there is only one right thing, it is for all time, and all other choices will be disastrous, and also to do the same as others as if any different choice is a personal condemnation of their choices or what’s on offer.

For us the choice has been simple as alongside ASD and overlapping difficulties, ds simply couldn’t access the curriculum in the way it was taught as standard, and the ability and interest in both teaching how to, and teaching him the contents simultaneously, wasn’t available. (and actually school and LEA gave up on him before we’d given up on them)

All the rest of the issues thrown up by it and school, social, others dislike of him, anxiety etc, where clouding that fundamental fact, which was at the bottom of the rest because kids have better radars for difference than educational providers.
They were trying to deal with the symptoms of failure and what thinks look like. Home ed (or tailored ed) has allowed the causes to be addressed and what thinks actually are.

What he really needed educationally and socially, didn’t fit with many home ed ideas either, but there has at least been far more acceptance of him just not being able to do what others can do, whilst being very able in places, as not making him either stupid, attention seeking, or a deliberate PITA.

thinks = things

The thing is, at school DD2 may be given ELSA sessions to help her with social interaction skills. What does she actually need, though? She needs social interaction.

The problem with this is that she is very, concrete in her learning. She learns something in one setting and finds it hard to adapt that learning to another setting. She needs exposure to the same situation in lots of settings to be able to generalise.

For instance:

Yesterday she went to swimming classes. She was changing and there was another girl there, who had been told off by her Mum. DD2 turned to me (in front of the girl) and said:

'Mummy...this girl's Mummy is very bossy!'

I, of course, told her that wasn't appropriate. DD1's carer told me that the girl had been told off because she had accidentally hit DD3 with a towel she threw.

'Jasmine continued:

The thing is, Mummy, this girl's Mummy didn't realise that towels are soft and that it wouldn't have hurt DD3 because towels are soft and not hard....'

Could I shut her up? Not a chance.

So really, that sort of thing could be a 'lesson' when we went shopping, for example. "We're going to go to the shops and the goal is that we won't talk about people in front of them."

That sort of thing will make the difference between 'surviving' and 'thriving' as an adult.

Exactly lougle. Social skills development needs a huge amount of real-time, real life involvement that schools are rarely able to provide on a scale necessary to make significant progress. Ds had quite a few social skills groups through school but, like your dd, he couldn't transfer to real-life situations and consequently continued to get it wrong. In fact, I look back at those sessions as being counter-productive as teachers seemed to believe he should manage better having had a half-hour chat around a table, so he was blamed and punished more when he got it wrong afterwards. What a waste of time, and how much more he could have learned if it had been done properly.

One series of sessions he had claimed to have 'covered' a list of about ten social skills in six weeks. That's just not possible - you can have discussed them but there's no way a child with autism is going to grasp and master those skills in that kind of time, especially without the real life experience to go with the theory.

Schools tend to deliver social skills programmes that are generic rather than specific, so are unlikely to fully meet the individual's needs. With HE you can choose the kind of social involvement your child needs, and tackle the skills deficits effectively. Gradual exposure, withdrawing before it goes wrong, easing forwards gently when the time is right. When ds was deregistered he couldn't spend ten minutes in the company of other children without having some form of stress response, often violent, and now you would barely know he has his diagnoses unless you knew what you were looking for. At school he'd have been just another failure statistic.

I will stress here that his success isn't just down to HE, but to his being provided with the RIGHT INTERVENTION that accurately fitted his needs. I believe this CAN be done in schools as well as in HE, but it seems to be much rarer, unfortunately. The resources just aren't there for successful and lasting progress.