utterly fed up.....exclusion...

[LilTreacle]

Just venting.......needs not being met, circumstances at school mean inconsistancy of environment, teaching staff and new things happening dialy.

So ds is back at ms school after 3 weeks off . Only on half days. Lots of changes to help reduce anxiety, which are not ideal and are a short term patch up to make it at all possible for ds to attend school while we check out ss alternatives and fight for a suitable placement.

A catalogue of errors happened today.
Predictably, ds got overwhelmed, went into demand avoidance, tried to run away and when he was stopped from getting outside, lashed out.

He is not to blame for his anxiety, or his reaction to it. Punnishments are unlikely to help I any way.

I dont see what exclusion does for any child....it seems a very ineffective way to manage behaviour whether NT or SEN.

Exclusion is unlikey to change ds behaviour as its due to needs not being met in school......ds is always in 'the moment' and has great difficulty linking cause and effect for his actions.....us working with him to understand expectations and coach him in coping strategies amounts to nothing when the fight/flight state kicks in.

I just dont see what it is going to achieve , apart from further confirm to ds he would rather be at home and one of us loses our job due to being off so often

Utterly fed up

Vent away....don't blame you for being fed up. I can't pretend to know what to say that is of real use but didn't want to read and run. Lots of and sent your way

The whole thing sounds like outrageous disability discrimination to me. They are in effect punishing him because they are incapable of handling his difficulties. You've probably got more than enough on your plate, but you could require the governors to review the exclusion and ask what reasonable adjustments they put in place to avoid this situation arising. And the half day arrangement isn't a reasonable adjustment, it's an unlawful exclusion.

Thats the thing....lots of adjustments have been made, with more being made as time goes on. Its agreed its not the right placement as cannot meet sensory needs in particular.

No idea what ekse they can do really, its just a crappy situation.

I have been in a similar situation and school were in fact found to have been discriminatory. The school may feel that they are making adjustments but are they the right ones? Our ds was placed on a part-time to apparently 'help' him but it just made things worse. Nenny is correct - this is illegal exclusion so you should be challenging this.

Do you have a statement and is all the provision being supplied? If so you need to have an emergency review as the school clearly cannot meet needs - your ds should not be being punished because of this.

Yes ds is statemented. An emergency review has already been carried out and more adjustments are being made while a suitable alternative is found.

I understand I could insist ds attends full time as that is his right.

However, being in a highly anxious state for extended periods is very damaging, and so introducing the adjustments and not overloading ds so that he is able to adjust himself is also important. Being part time is gving him the opportunity to return to school and get used to the way things are being managed now, while ensuring he has relief from the stress.

today went wrong. More consistency is needed, and it will be challenged as explosions are predictable when things are inconsistent.

Really feel for you. The only thing exclusion does in our experience is give the teacher a short breather. The fact that child comes back into the classroom even more stressed than he was before as a result is completely ignored. And, yes like your son the only thing it taught ds2 is that if I behave badly enough I will be sent home - taking quite a time to undo that one.

The school seems to be expecting that the changes they've put in place will have immediate effect. It will take time for your son to adjust to them and perhaps they need this to be pointed out to them. In the meantime, they must accept the consequences of the situation they have caused by not meeting his needs effectively in the first place, but they absolutely should not be excluding him.

My son and I went through very similar experiences. I didn't want to go down the damaging road of repeated exclusions due to the school's management failures, and we ended up home educating. Stick to your guns and make sure they keep up their duty of care to your child.

Have a look at this from IPSEA as this information from them on exclusions could be useful to you:-

www.ipsea.org.uk/Apps/Content/HTML/?id=136

I would talk to IPSEA as well, they now offer a callback service

Your child is entitled to full-time education if he can cope with it, that does not mean it all has to take place at school. Some of it could be 'education otherwise than at school' s.319 Education Act 1996. So you could ask for a mix of home tutors and PT school. Or internet school.

But asking for home support can lead to more pressure to rush going back to school FT

We've had this on a small scale with ds2 at MS. I think for us because it was so laughably obvious what could have been done to change his reactions and responses that we just keep pressing for adjustments even if it wasn't in the school's "normal" behaviour policy. So in your son's case, if he tries to run away again, there should be a place he can run too near the classroom, which is safe. Even if no-one else in the class gets to use the same prerogative. Ds was given extra touchtyping classes at lunchtime and this worked well for while to remedy the SPLD issues which are still ongoing. However, after a while his anxiety and frustration kicked in (he hated the sound of the cow's voice on the programme, saying now touch the n key and he hated having to do the same stuff over and over) So after a term of successful touchtyping a very surprised staff member (who thought ds2 was extremely well behaved) was a bit cross he wasn't doing what she said, and said he was pretending to be tired when it was clear he wasn't too tired to play computer games in the SEN room. Cue meltdown. So we said to them...right you need to reduce all his homework so he can do other stuff in break, and can do touchtyping at home, not tell him he needs to do touchtyping. It's no longer working in this context (school lunchtime) even though it did work when it was a novelty and the cow's voice wasn't quite so tiresome etc etc, and maybe it would have worked, but now we know it IS TOO MUCH.
EVERY TIME he responds badly to some situation, challenge them and ask them to come up with a solution or offer a better solution, but don't let them say he needs to behave like this or else. He will behave well if he can.
In primary my son scratched someone in the playground because he thought they were hitting him when they bumped into him by accident. They complained to me that the bumping into him was an accident so he shouldn't have scratched the person. I complained to them that ds2 should not have been left in that situation in the playground, unsupervised so that he was even in the position to feel so threatened. They arranged a Nurture Group refuge at lunchtime and a Lego Club to tackle those issues. He didn't scratch anyone again or lash out. It is pointless telling your ds not do things which as you say he is responding in a visceral way to very stressful situations.

No ASD child should ever be told "look at me when I'm talking to you" or backed into a corner. But some teachers or TAs or lunchtime supervisors are really unaware of this, not their fault, but lack of training and management.

my ds is on his 4th exclusion now! I approached the head and asked her what does my ds get out of being excluded? Nothing! She agreed and said she just doesn't have the resources to keep him in school.

This is where is all falls down, the government need to give schools more money to tell with those children that are struggling!!

Its not an uncommon problem and that is shameful.

We have the same situation [swan] - the needs not being met cause the behaviour.
Unfortunately the TA 1:1s ds has have no clue how to deal with his anxiety, make matters worse in most cases by chasing him, literally backing him into a corner or trying to bring him back by hand...and he fights them off. This has led to a number not wanting to support him any longer, which is part of the problem.

the new adjustments have been successful in the main but are resourced by the senior staff not TAs and is not sustainable. The learnjng environment has been improved to better meet needs but means using meeting rooms and offices which are not always available so change day to day...they cant meet needs in a consistent way, which means ds cant be expected to cope full time.

will be onto the LA to provide the full time education

Does the sm say that staff need to be consistent in their management? If so the school need to be reminded of this as failure to provide the provision in the sm can be considered to be discrimination as they are not making reasonable adjustments.

consistancy is common sense surely?
Yes the statement says consistent language and approach needed from all staff.

MS is just the wrong environment. End of.

You would think consistency would be common sense but staff failed to do that in our case

As the environment is wrong you need to be pushing the LA to provide full time education which it is their duty to do. The school also should be confirming that they can't meet needs which is clear as he can't attend school full time.

We are pushing. We are visiting all the options to identify the most suitable in order to make an informed decison about where ds should go.
the LA will offer the place that has space right now.....that is not necessarily the best option for the long term, and we dont want multiple moves if we can avoid it.

its the interim time while the right place is dentified and waiting for a place to be availabke that we are struggling with.

so far, nothing actually meets needs, some go a longer way to meeting most needs, but nothing has ticked all the boxes thus far.

Frustrating in the extreme.