Am I being too oversensitive??

[lollipoprainbow]

My dd 9 has recently been diagnosed with ASD. She really struggles with friendships and the school are well aware of this. There's two girls that she is sort of friends with but I always feel three is a difficult number and she would much rather just play with the one girl. The two other girls sit next to each other and every PE lesson the girls partner each other, according to my dd the teacher tells the class to pick a partner and one of the girls immediately says 'I'm with M she's my partner' before my dd gets a chance to pick this girl!! My Dd said this happens every week and this week when it happened she cried and everyone was staring at her and the teacher told her to stop crying and pick a partner ! Knowing my dd and her friendship struggles am I being unreasonable to feel that the teacher shouldn't allow the children to pick their partners and she should tell them who their partners are? Should she be allowing my dd to cry every week? Or am I being too overprotective ?!

Schools are required to make "reasonable adjustments" for pupils with disabilities, so the teacher should be doing something to avoid your DD being distressed every week, whether that's allocating partners to all the kids herself, letting DD choose first or some other tactic.

@Ellie56 thank you my thoughts exactly.

I'd ring up the school and remind them of their duties under the Equality Act 2010.

I think I would initially speak to the school, not in a critical way, but to bring it to their attention. I think this is more likely to be an oversight on the teacher's behalf rather than malicious. Unless you have a child with social difficulties it is easy for people to overlook this kind of thing. Then if it continues after that complain more strongly.

@10brokengreenbottles the teacher knows she told me about her crying !! That's why I find it unbelievable that she allows it to happen

Apologies, from your OP I thought it was your DD recounting the situation.

To clarify, I think there is a difference between a teacher knowing about social difficulties and knowing this specific situation may be upsetting. I realised DD's teacher knows about her friendship issues, but from your OP I didn't realise you had raised this specific issue. It easy for those outside of the SEN world to cause problems via carelessness, rather than malicious.