Statement advice School refusing boy age 12 AS

[Bignorthernlass]

Just on the way to my sons Asd assessment. It does seem that getting a statement is so much 'easier' your child explodes rather than implodes? My son is refusing school. Any ideas on how to navigate the statementing system based on potential mental health triggers and anxiety? School have already offered the adjustments but he still won't go in! Thanks

Is he going in at all at the moment? Mine are exploders rather than imploders but a lot of our argument for statutory assessment was the amount of schooling they missed which is similar to your situation. We also listed the adjustments that school had already made and described what effect if any they had (not much) in improving the situation to show that the support that was needed was beyond the schools resources. Mine are now in specialist schools as their anxiety was just too great in mainstream.

My DS (HFA 12) is an 'imploder' - he didn't manage the transition to secondary school and having outwardly coped for the first term (exploding at home) he didn't manage to get into school for more than a couple of days in Jan and has been off since.

I agree with OneInEight that your argument for statutory asssessment whether your child is an 'exploder' or 'imploder' is that they are not making adequate progress - and obviously if they are not getting into school because of anxiety they can't access the curriculum fully.

We put in a parental request for SA in May and it was accepted - the LA could hardly claim that DS was making adequate progress or was being supported by his school as he couldn't even make it into class. DS does have an ASD diagnosis (diagnosed 18 months ago) and I also put in the request that we would consider it discriminatory not to assess DS as it was clearly evident that his disability( or more acccurately the anxiety as a result of his ASD) was preventing him from accessing the curriculum 'in line with his non-disabled peers'. I don't know if that added any weight to our request.