Nearly 3yo DS with severe verbal dyspraxia and looking ahead to school

[HiawathaDidntBotherTooMuch]

My 2.9 yo DS has been diagnosed with severe verbal dyspraxia. The diagnosis was made a few months ago, and he has been having weekly language therapy privately ever since. He has also been seen by the community paediatrician, referred for occupational therapy and I have applied for portage. Progress on the language side is zero. He has no recognisable language at all, and although he can make all vowel sounds, the only consonant sounds he can make are b, g and d. But his listening, attention and concentration skills, interaction, eye contact have progressed loads.

I have been looking at schools for him. He would start in September 2016. We can afford a private school. I took him to one last week, as they suggested he go to pre school there for a year, so from September 2015, and they like children to have a trial morning in advance of that. I said that of course he wouldn't be starting for another 8 months, but ok I took him. He liked it, and so did I, very much, but the school said that they would not take him. They felt that he needed more specialist schooling with one to one SLT daily.

I am gutted. I think that this school's view is likely to be indicative of every other independent school local to us, as they all have waiting lists and can afford to be choosy. So I think he will have to go to state school. But the problem there is that there are very few schools in our borough with specialist language facilities, and there is enormous competition for them each year as I live in a hugely populated borough.

I don't have confidence in the state. And independent schools don't seem to have confidence in having him. Even though we have ages yo go before he would start school, I do feel that he will be really let down.

Hang in there.
You have done well by getting good early intervention in. And just because one school feels a bit overwhelmed doesn't mean the next one will.

The schools will need a good grip on what they are supposed to do, and I don't know if you have a good Educational Psychologist report yet to explain how they would have to adapt the classroom and their teaching to be sure they were doing things right.

About the best EP I know is Peter Parkhouse. But whoever you chose and whenever you decide to get an opinion they will be able to give you guidance about schools as well as setting out for the school's benefit what they need to do.

Hope this helps
Oh and there is more support and info on the 'chat about my child' tab than on this one

Thanks very much. I hadn't considered getting an EP report for him yet, due to his age and the length of time between now and starting school. Do you think now is the right time?

If you can afford only one then get it in the build up to transition to primary ie this time next year.
Otherwise get one now, and if needed you can get it repeated a year later,

Actually, The EP reports cannot use the same tests too often or they start throwing up false positives, BUT there is more than one type of EP-test so the EP could always do a different one if you needed a new one before the year was up.

If you can make a trip to the west country [email protected] is a lot cheaper than if you need him to travel eg to look at your proposed school and the LAs preferred school. His travel does add a lot to the cost.

You could also jump the gun on OT by using an independent one. Julia Terteryan at Chelsea Children's Therapy is good, but doesn't do tribunals and Miri Horovitz Cohen is great on sensory. I'm afraid I am running a bit dry on recommendations after that,

I have no feel for whether Speech and Language therapy would help although logically it should.

Hope this helps

Thanks for your view senvet. Private SLT is now suggesting a likely social communication disorder too.p, after seeing DS for 4 months and building up her view. I need the NHS SLT on board but everything moves so very slowly in our area.

Hi HiawathaDidntBotherTooMuch,

Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia is caused by mutations in the FOXP2 gene, you could have a look at the CituLike "Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia" research paper sharing libary.
www.citeulike.org/group/18272/library/order/year,,
Speech and langauge therapy would be the best way forward.

Thanks for thinking of me, dolfrog, but there is way too much science and terminology there for me to make any sense of it!