Year 11 moved to PRU

[fegus]

DD has ASD and selective mutism, she hasn't spoken in school since she was 12. She is currently accessing only the core curriculum as that's all they offer at the referral school, but she was doing well in other subjects, and after a meeting at school today , they don't seem to want to enter her for the other subjects , French etc, which we can do at home, and she is amazing at anyway.
Just looking for some experience of this, or any advice would be good. X

I was thinking of her GCSE's, . x

Does she have an EHCP? I would have thought this would address it best.

Ehcp is on going, at panel at the moment. It's all taking so long , and mean time .. .xx

Thank you . x

What does she want to do? At her age they should give a lot of weight to that.

This is totally not on. Your dd has a right to access the full National Curriculum regardless of whatever behavioural issues caused her to be placed in the PRU. ds1 has a specialist school placement because the local secondary EBD school could only offer 3 GCSE's.

It is worth looking round, therefore, at the independent sector whilst your EHCP is being processed - not great timing though to happen in a GCSE year. Is the argument that she is stressed so doing too many GCSE's might cause problems or simply that they don't have the staff to cover the full curriculum.

How long has it been with the EHCP? They should decide whether they're going to issue an EHCP within 10 weeks of the date they agreed to assess, and if they are going to issue one, they should finalise it within 14 weeks of that date. If they're beyond it, you should consider threatening judicial review proceedings. It's highly unlikely that you'd ever have to take it to court, but if you did you would get legal aid in your daughter's name.

The whole arrangement sounds to me very much like disability discrimination. PRUs only offer core curriculum subjects because they need to spend time addressing things like behavioural problems that have led to children being permanently excluded, which I assume doesn't apply to your child. I wouldn't have thought a PRU is at all suitable for someone with selective mutism and ASD; she should really be looking at something like a specialist school, and you should be given the chance to express a preference for that.

You might find it useful to phone SOS SEN.