School saying can't assess child's attainment as he has ASD!

[firecracker123]

My DS has full time one to one TA in school; he has ASD and ADHD and is in mainstream primary. It is fair to say he does work largely with with the TA's support rather than independently.

I have just had his parent's evening and the teacher said she can not tell me how much progress he has made on NC levels as he does not work independently enough for her to assess him! This has not been an issue the last 2 years in the school and I do not think its acceptable that she has not tracked his progress. She made some very generic comments about his progress but last year at his annual review the LA were very keen to use progress on NC levels as a measure of his progress so I am concerned that this is not being tracked. I think the real issue is that she is not differentiating the work adequately for him and that limits opportunities for him to work independently.

My instinct as a parent and an ex SEN governor is that all this totally against best practice?

Has he got a statement / ehcp? Surely you need nc levels to track progress?

If the ct can't assess him has he seen a ep? Surely a ep can baseline him?

Sounds strange to me. In fact my mates a teacher and she showed me how she marks nc levels. It's mostly on the number of times you observe them demonstrating things, so unless he never reads or writes down anything it seems fishy to me

Sounds like a complete cop out. DS2 is only just beginnign to access the national curriculum in year 4 and the school have always found ways of assessing him, against PIVATS, Enhanced curriculum or whatever. He doesn't get a standard report at report time, but I do get to see massive detailed sheets of skills ticked off at annual review time.

From what you've said about past years, current teacher has no excuse at all.

He has had a full time statement since nursery. He is in a mixed age class of yr4 to yr6 and I fear the teacher teaches mainly geared towards the older SATS aged children. He was, at end of year 3 on level 2 english and almost a 3 for maths so behind but accessing the curriculum.

He has an IEP the targets of which are assessed frequently but the last attainment test (which scored him by standardised scales into percentiles) he had was at end of year 2 so almost 2 years ago. I think I may need to ask for a similar assessment again.

I have been reading through the SEN code of practice and attainment and assessment are core principles in him that they are not measuring with him

ETA - he is currently year 4

Teacher needs to talk to previous teacher if possible, to compare notes and techniques. Can't understand why this one is working in a bubble and ignoring previous experience.

He does all the work the others do but often with prompting so they will say something like "write a poem about your pet" and he will have his one to one TA help him think of ideas and prompt him as to how to write it. So it is his work but not independently done

And, without assessment, how is teacher deciding if IEP targets have been met?

Sound ridiculous to me. She could record the actual attainment of his writing and then annotate that it's with support etc. If he struggles to get ideas down then they should be using alternative strategies to do this - for example story boarding, voice recorders (you can use one that records and writes the ideas to use a promt, visual clues of ideas (eg prints pictures form a computer). Then they can give him a chance to write independently - it may be they take him somewhere quiet with no distractions and see what he can produce.

Same with maths - he should have some questions he can access independently and then a set of harder questions he may need talking through.

It sounds like they haven't worked out how much (length of time wise) he can concentrate and work without an adult, used that as baseline, and worked on from there.

Also if be suggesting the TA has an assessment sheet - so that they can record what your DS completes without prompts and what with prompts.
Then just record what he's accessed alone and what he can do alone. Surely of he's then managing higher with support they use this to find stategies to supoort him building up to working at that level alone?

It's nonsense - of course she can assess him. Is she very inexperienced?

They can't have it both ways - either they can assess nc levels and depend on them or they can't.

I agree, ideally you would have two sets of info, the first of his attainment prompred and the second of his attainment unprompted.

That would probably indicate the difference that is made by the prompting.

The nature of the prompting is interesting. It would seem that the 1 to 1 is sometimes breaking the task down into manageable steps, and sometimes helping dc with 'theory of mind' stuff ie translating what a mainstream person means by poetry. Is that fair?

If he is working at level 2 then there must be things he is doing independently. If he's not dong anything independently, then the level of work he's currently being given is completely inappropriate.