Ineed an update!!!

[Ineedmorepatience]

It was ajourned until May!!!

Panel were really good again and very knowledgeable but school made a massive thing about how well she is doing and how she doesn't seem to need support!!

I repeated numerous times that she is masking and starting to fall apart at home but the panel felt that because she is in a new school, they should have more time to gather more evidence!!!

Shame because I felt it was going well too

senvet I am fairly sure they said I could submit more evidence, just not the EP assessment as the one she has just had will be less than 6 months old! My rep was very unhappy about it because he said the LA will now send in their EP and hers will be more up to date

My indie EP said there are other things that can be done so we will make a decision about that with him!

ineed if there is a silver lining to this, it will be that this placement DOES fail before the next hearing and you end up with a wonderful specialist ASD provision.

Do you have one in mind already, or are you wanting ms?

Yes there is that senvet I have no idea about Asd provision tbh There are 2 possible indie SS's which would probably work for her locally but neither is actually Asd specific lots to think about!!

If I am really honest I think we would HE for a while if she drops out of school altogether and then there is a provision nearby from yr 10 which would suit her creatively and pastorally.
They would get her enough GCSE's to get to college or she could stay and do a level 3 course of some discription!

Sorry ineed posts crossed and then I went off for the day.

If the EP assessments are too close together then they give false positives. I expect you already knew that.

And the only way round it that I have heard of is to do a different test. Can't remember what they call the two main tests (BASC and WISC come to mind but I am hopeless at names). Your EP will know. And your EP will know what chance there is of the LA-EP's evidence giving false positives even if different tests are used. There is one test about how robust children are as learners which has questions which don't necessarily make sense to ASD kids, so see if you can find out what test they are doing. It may be that it isn't telling them as much as they think it is.

BUT that doesn't stop YOUR Ed Psych going in to the school and seeing what they are achieving and seeing what she is like at home and doing either a supplementary report or just giving the evidence orally.

I have heard of parents keeping their kids up late before an LA-EP assessment to help their case. I'm not sure I could bring myself to do it, but I've never been in that position. The LA-EP will record how co-operative the child seems and if they are tired anyway.

And if the Tribunal won't admit video evidence that you take then show it to your EP and they can talk about it.

Hope you sleep better tonight

Thanks senvet I hope so too I am really tired now!

Write to sendist now and ask re costs. Once a desision has been made you can put a order in for costs to be paid.

Worth a shot. I Feel confident mine will be

DS1's is approaching £60K a year. About half the cost of similar down south.

Hi Ineed, hope you're starting to get some rest now. It took me about a week before I stopped dreaming about the hearing - what I said, what I should have said, what they missed etc etc.

What really helped me was finding something to do that was totally absorbing, totally brainless, and physically draining. Dancing to very loud techno did that for me, but watching a Gray's Anatomy boxset on a hamster wheel would probably have the same effect...

icimoi , just read your post - I'm not in regular contact with any panel members. I'm basically just a regular parent of kids with SN who helps a charity out with research and campaigning from time to time. That's how I've come into contact with panel members, random LA bods etc.

I think it's absolutely right and fair that SENDIST should know more about the impact of their decisions - not just during the process, but afterwards too. I think that their service would be better if they understood how their decisions matter - how a great provision transforms the lives of the child and family, or how a poor decision does the exact opposite. The SOS!SEN links that Bilberry put up - particularly the response from SENDIST - show how far they have to go.

I don't know if the panel members I've met thus far are representative. But the ones I met couldn't give a toss about the impact on the child or family.

I don't get the impression that there are many full-time panel members, tbh. Many of them seem to belong to that class of 'SEN experts' that make a living gliding between different state services as contractors: Ofsted inspectors, burned-out senior EPs, retired LA specialist service staff, and so on.

Being on a panel is a decent gig - a couple of years ago, it was about £400 per day plus expenses in the South-East, according to one I spoke to. But it's not the only iron that many of these people have in the fire.

It does make me wonder how SENDIST ensures that there are no conflicts of interest. I hope that they'd investigate each panel member's recent employment history to ensure that they haven't recently worked for the LA at the hearing, or intend to do so in the future. OTOH, they might just do what Ofsted do, and rely on the innate honesty and integrity of the person being employed...

Thanks ugger I did sleep better, still had wierd dreams but that is fairly normal for me. I think it will take about a week too to wind down, there is so much stress before and during the tribunal that it takes a while to calm back down again!

I think post tribunal your body is in some kind of shock as you have been living on your adrenaline and nerves for so long that you body needs time to recover - I think each time its taken about 2 months for me to get over the tribunal stress that has physically impacted on me. the difficulty you face is that in 4 months you are back at tribunal again so your body isn't going to get the right amount of time to recover so do make sure that you look after you over the next few weeks so that you are strong enough to carry onto the next part of this ridiculous journey the LA are forcing you into

Thanks bjk I came close to cracking this time! Goodness only knows how we get through the next 4 months and try to retain some sort of normality at home!

Add into that a depressed 19 yr old who has returned home after working away for 6 months and has no money and no friends at home!

Fortunately she does have a new contract starting in March so we only have 8 weeks to get through but today it feels like a life time

Hey ho, the joys of parenting! Remind me why we do this

Think bjk is right about the stress-hangover. But you do get a bit Tribunal 'hardened' I think. With ours, I wasn't feeling quite as ill for the 2nd, and also recovered faster

The bundle-preparing /writing up the paperwork bits get much easier. The old bundle means you know where everything is- ready to prune heavily & insert any new reports. For parent-bits, Cut, paste & update.

Plus you already know the SENCOP, ipsea & sossen websites backwards, have shortcut to the Tribunal forms & david wolfe's Noddy Guide to sen on the computer, have the habit of logging and keeping everything, know to follow up with the email trail for any calls or meetings, have all the experts numbers & emails in your favourites... The first appeal is the worst by far.

And I know this is 'technically' the same one, but you'll now get a second bite at the evidence cherry, as said above.

So it'll 'feel' like another one. Which means the last one was your dry run- making you a little bit more 'even' with the LA in regards to experience of being in the hearing.

Does anyone do their own witness statements in advance?

My relatives' Tribunal we started with a a heading 'DC Now' and went through the day, veering off for examples of difficult times and exceptionally smooth times. LOTS of examples as we trotted from waking at 7 am through to sleeping (sporadically) and back to the alarm at 7 am. Better than saying 'DC finds socialising hard' was to say 'DC is always the loudest, and barges into a group unaware of how annoyed the other children look. He is desperate for a friend, but does not realise that you cannot make them by shouting about your own subject (dragons) from the centre of a rapidly disappearing group of kids'

We scrapped the questionnaire format which seemed unhelpful. Why is it relevant what happened at birth? The Tribunal has to answer what the DC needs now, not why it might have occurred.

ineed the point for you at this stage is something you are probably doing already which is getting the examples together.

I wonder if they would accept a witness statement of how DC has been in the period Jan-May? They are supposed to judge the child as they are on the day of the tribunal...

Do you think it would help?

Yes meir and at least next time we wont have the worry over who the panel will be!

The next one will be my forth time at tribunal! The 3rd for Dd3 and I did a refusal to assess for a child I work with, actually no she has another before mine so it will be 5! All against the same LA rep!!

senvet The panel asked me loads about the past last week and I will definitely be taking a diary of how she has been including examples when we go back!

i have done 'file notes' of every meeting I had with professionals etc and submitted them in evidence as well.

I have got my daughter herself to keep a diary of the bad days and submitting all of that in evidence as well as what she writes is incredibly powerful and also shows her dire handwriting and spelling especially as school may well twitter about what amazing progress she has made and the evidence to counter it is there in black and white as her thoughts are hard to read - we also get her to write on her ipad as well and printed all of them out as well so there is a whole huge section of DD views and it will be very very hard reading for the school witness as they say she is fine at school as she is overly compliant but her thoughts show that she is in absolute turmoil at school so maybe ineed get her to date that over the next few months

Great ideas bjk thanks

We had Dd3's views taken by an independent person, she said some very interesting things but she finds it really hard to say what she feels!
Writing it down might be easier for her.

bjk I am definitely adding the DC's notes and ideas to my checklist.

If mum or dad is keeping notes, why not DC as well?

Great idea.
You don't have a patent on it do you?

in the last tribunal I did something similar in that I got her to do her views at home - the panel held her views in an awful lot of weight especially as she was asking them directly for help - her words are more powerful than anything I could ever write and its a way of her voice being heard - she is the typical compliant aspie girl so she would never ever step out of line at school following the rules to a ridiculous length which also causes issues - in the judgement the panel refer to her views as well so this time we got her when she came home and would be in tears to write down what had happened at school - she would then when she was feeling unhappy just do it and she knew how to send her notes from her ipad to an email to me so ive had to endure some quite upsetting emails from her but its been a good way for her to 'let it go' rather than hold it all in. there are pages and pages and pages of her views talking about the 'bullying' how she is alone at playtimes - the list goes on - no way a panel can dismiss her views. ive also submitted all the views from the previous tribunal as well as it makes the bundle read like a book and it tells as story

Thanks for sharing that bjk I really need to get Dd3 to start writing some stuff down!

We did get her views independently and our EP pushed the fact that she has a voice and knows what she wants and needs to be heard!

Maybe its a good thing in the long run that we get another bite at the cherry in May!! Although we should never have been put into this situation in the first place!

If we lived half a mile down the road in the next authority she would have a statement by now