If your HFA child was/is in secondary mainstream, what support did an EHCP bring?

[knittingwithnettles]

My son is being assessed for an EHCP. All the independent reports I have had suggested he would be better off in a specialist setting as he has dyslexia and HFA, but I am still clinging onto the idea that he can be supported in mainstream if he just has an EHCP (I have a "helpful" school in mind nearby, which has a good record of supporting statemented children with autism).

Am I being deluded to think that in a class of 30 children, even with 1:1 some of the time this is going to be a good way for him to learn (he is very behind in his writing skills and needs quite explicit teaching) On the other hand he is sociable so would benefit from all the extras of a mainstream.

Tell me your experiences, both positive and negative. Son is 13, going into Year 9 and has been homeschooled for a year. Year 7 was on SAplus but it didn't work out - we would go to a different mainstream this time probably.

I think what the SALT for example was highlighting was that you cannot necessarily do all the extra interventions tacked on to mainstream teaching if you are dealing with both social communication AND dyslexia AND disorganisation. Your child is going to be shadowed by a TA, which they don't necessarily want rather than being an independent learner, which they might have managed in specialist school.

What do you think?

bump as it was a bit late last night

This is our story:

My DS, who is 12, with PDA, adhd, dyslexia and fine motor dyspraxia, has now been out of school for 12 months.

In my honest opinion, I knew he wouldn't cope in MS yet wanted to give him the opportunity to see if it worked. We still haven't found a suitable school.

He went into secondary with statement with full time 121 support, apart from breaks and lunchtime. I genuinely thought it had a good chance of it being successful. Unfortunately this wasn't the case.

I'm currently beginning my evidence gathering for tribunal. And if my reports suggested independent, then I'll definitely be fighting for that.

Thank you Money

Do you think it was the school's fault for not implementing statement properly, or was it because no mainstream could ever have the sufficient resources? I'm sorry you had such a bad time in Year 7.

I hope your year out of school has not been too difficult (in so far as it is easy to recover from the experience of school going wrong). I've learnt so much about ds2 in the last year, and had some great times with him home educating but it is still galling to feel there is no proper "place" for him - I know he wants to be busy and active and with "people". Home educating needs to be quite full on for him because he needs so much structure and imput. I may yet just persevere with Home Ed; still ambivalent in that respect, I do feel there is so much more I want for him than just to be "minded".

Hi knitting my ds is the same age as yours and in Y9 of a small, independent MS school, which is an out of area LA placement, supported by a statement (about to be transferred to EHCP). He has ASD, severe anxiety and slow processing, plus handwriting issues that means he uses a laptop, although is classed as not having any LD's.

The school he is in was renowned for being excellent at supporting pupils with a similar profile to ds, as well as those with dyslexia and/or ADHD. Unfortunately, the head that put all that support in place left over the summer just before ds started and Y7 was truly diabolical, despite there being a max of 12 per class and an extremely high level Learning Skills Support, plus school SALT.

It took until the Spring term of Y8 and the second SENCO they'd had since he got there, to get them to even begin to implement his statement properly. As soon as they did that, plus allocating a specific LSA to support him organisationally, his grades shot up and have continued to rise this year.

We are now on the third SENCO in three years, but this has been the first Autumn half term that he hasn't had a minimum of a week off with stress/anxiety and he actually seems to be happy at school. Again, this is evidenced by his grades going up and them already wanting to speak to us about moving up a set.

Having gone through two and half years with ds1 there, I am 100% sure there is no way he could possibly have survived in a mainstream secondary. Ds2 is at the local one (that refused to take ds1) and there are 1600 pupils over an enormous site with far fewer LSAs.

Socially, ith as been a huge quandry. He had a small group of lovely friends, but has also been horribly bullied by the 'popular' lads and is despondent about being at the bottom of the popularity heap. We keep an open dialogue about this and try our best to get him to understand that true friends are important over popularity. We had a breakthrough this week when I explained how artificial the school social environments is and about a schoolfriend of mine that was super popular and led the pack, but couldn't hack it when school finished and they realised they weren't top of the heap outside of a school playground.

I have to admit, we have come close to pulling him out and homeschooling so many times and we still aren't 100% sure we've done the right thing by keeping him in school, but he is highly sociable, wants friends and enjoys his friends company and in all honesty, I couldn't offer him that level of social opportunities if he were homeschooled.

I don't envy you the decision. Sometimes I think all we can do is keep moving forward, hope we've done the right thing and act quickly, when an if we sense we've taken a wrong turn.

knitting, it was a bit of both. However, we only found out about them not fully implementing the statement recently. I do believe we'd have still ended up with the same outcome either way.

He's being tutored at home by the LA. I've not been home educating him. However, he's got school out of his system now and the huge change in him is immense. I realise just how much he adapts/struggles now and want to make sure he gets the right placement.