need some input

[needmorecoffee]

I'm doing a report on inclusive education and need some input from non-disabled parents. Already got input from disabled adults, disabled kids and disabled parents but we need to hear non-disabled views on inclusion given the vast majority of disabled poeple have non-disabled parents.
So
Thoughts on inclusion vs segregation and WHY.
Is it lack of suitable support or the actual impairment that leads to parents wanting segregated education?
What do parents know about the sociel model vs the medical model and which do they subscibe too, as it were.
If a child got a suitable level of support plus all the required equipment (look, a flying pig) would more parents be happy about inclusion?
Do parents think co-location will take away their rights to insist on an inclusive education?

Any thoughts would be welcome as we are meeting with the council next week. ta muchly

The needs of children with LD is given very low priority in our present system. Ds has Sev LD. He was turned down for a statement on starting school. The lady at the LEA said he did not have 'exceptional needs' (the grounds for a statement here)- he was not ( and I quote)'in a wheelchair'!! There is unoficial discrimination against children with LD. At 4 he was not 4 years behind but had the skills of a child half his age. Without a statement he had to go to ms. So there was no choice. I was forced to send him to ms school to be neglected and leftunsupported and dispirited when if the system had worked properly he may have progressed!
This is something really iniquitous and is worse than a couple of decades ago. Dont let my anger offend anyone but the truth is if a childs brain damage affects their physical development it is treated very differently to a child with affected cognition!! All children have needs including those with LD!!
Not quite what you asked!

I agree magso, its what is the most worrying thing. We were told if we had not moved from another part of the country to here with a statement dd would NOT have been given one as she was 'too normal' she has mild-moderate physical disabilities and moderate- severe LDS. Luckily the statement covered her for the sld/pmld school. Oh and do I feel lucky she got in there. My friends daughter appears more 'normal' than dd (P6-L1 at 10) and they are refusing special school at all. Yet mainstream really cannot cope with her, she isnt learning anything and she becoming increasingl;y distressed

the system stinks. Special school is NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

I wouldn't trust the state to deicde on schooling anymore than I'd give them a right to choose medical treatment. Should be the parents choice.
The mainsream dd is in now is very experienced with non-verbal communication. Its why I picked them.
I reckon LEA's do anything to not to have to spend money. The statementing process is like pulling teeth!

Thats the trouble though isnt it? They will let any child go into mainstream without support because it saves them money. Its criminal

or without adequate support, it should say. I would even go as far as to say its child abuse

I told the LEA bod that last week cos dd still doesn'#t have a communication aid. Basically they are blocking her right to communicate.
We have a big meeting next Tuesday about it.
Anyhow, am puking (not right this second but suddenly got not well) , got a zillion appointments and meetings coming up and OMG Xmas isn't far.
Cathc you ladies anon.

I think it's the same old same old. Either 'the kid looks normal so there can't be much wrong with them can there' (the number of people who think that a child with DS must be more learning disabled than ds1 is frightening) or 'oh well they have severe learning disabilities so they're such a vegetable they're not going to notice anything going on around them anyway'.

I thank the lord for my son's special school where the children are valued and can be themselves.

It seems to varye verywhere- I found getting statements easy (BUT I have an excetionally violent child, right now that term suits mroe than aggressive , and I refused to send ds3 to schoolm witjhout one and they hate Home Ed here) it could just have been my bull in a china shop approach. BUT there is very little access to SN school- the sn schools want to take ds3, its the LEA that poo-poo the idea

Yes I have called it child abuse too!
Now I hear that Ds special school might close because it is not full!! It was so hard to get the LEAS approval I'm not surprised it is not full!!More iniquities!! ( Magso getting all campaining now)

oh snap here magso. They want to combine the schools because of 'falling rolls' (or is it roles?)

Actually I'll be interested to see what happens. The other special school sits on prime development land so the theory was that they were going to sell that off - but of course there's no point doing that now, so am waiting to see if the plan still goes ahead. Of course they have the interests of the children at heart

Scope closed a school locally to sell the land for redevelopment (very controversial the kids all had PMLD and apparently Scope were going to put energies into inclusion- went down like a lead balloon and effectively left the children abandonnned - didn't help that their managers were turning up to talk to families about how Scope didn't have themoney to carry on but were arriving in Jags. Not the most sensitive thing to do ). It's on the same road as ds2's school and I must admit I do snigger when I see that they have been unable to sell the site.

selfish bunch iof wankers

they have closed all mld schools round here and tried to combine as many pmld/sld schools as possible. DDs pmld/sld school is overloaded with children with mld who have no other school to go to because 'mainstream cannot cope with them' seems a familiar story

There are lots of misconceptions about special schools that get my goat too. I think people forget our children ARE children. They make friendships and do everything else that other children do (in their own way of course) and need to mix with their peers on their own level to do this. I wish people would think before they open their mouths about special schools, especially those with children with special needs themselves. Children are no less able because they go to special school just as much as children with sn that go to mainstream are more able, iykwim

'just as much as children with sn that go to mainstream are more able'

is meant to say..just as much as children with sn that go to mainstream are not any more able

I know what I mean in my head, nit sure I am explaining well enough though. I just get the impression people think your child is 'worse' because they go to special school and their own child is doing 'better' because they go to mainstream, when it has no bearing whatsoever and the oppsite may be true

Yes I am certain there are children needing those places! Feel we the privaleged parents whose children have/had a place in this excellent specialised school)should go support those whose children need it but have been denied!

Yes I think that's a common misconception.

Ime people tend too much to link disability with normality. So if you look "normal" they find it hard to see how you can be disabled. Someone recently said to me in fact "I forget sometimes that you can't see, because you look and act so normal." and I do wonder whether that has anything to do with why some people insist that their children attend mainstream school, because attending a special school will mean that people won't look at them as being "normal".

I do think the reasons can be complex- there was a Foster Mum fighting to keep her ADD charge at her school to lo9ts of cried of 'oh so selfish' from other apents (he was admittedly very disruptive)_ I found out yesterday that the real reasn was that the other school has meant he has been placed with a Fostre Mum closer to the school, so in 5 years he has been abandoned by parents, grandparents in turn, and then lost a Foster Mm who wuld have kept him and had cared since he was 2.

At our last review the Paed championed the idea of SN school with us, but it was agreed th4 statement would say 'temporarily at X school' (current) so he could be assessed for a spaecialist language unit where we had already been told he could NOT go due to the asd thing. We never received the amended statement. We were told that the 2 units we liked were about to close after a review; it never happened and when i followed up no aprents had heard ad its not in ay Coundil / LEA minutes. I thouught I ahd imagined it (I often assume that, not a lot of faith in myself) but the Paed had minuted it too and is pissed off also.

agree wannabe.

I have never regretted the fact that Ds1 is currently in a special school, that particular one is absolutely the best environment for him.

Wannabe, I agree. I think a lot of it is the social need for acceptance, not a shred of thought about whether it means the best education or the best long term outcome for the children.

In the case of ASDs,a mainstream school is often the worst of all worlds. A social nightmare with no way for us to be 'included' - any more than putting a totally blind child into an art college where painting in watercolours is the only medium they can use, then hoping they will turn out to be Leonardo da Vinci. Or putting a child who is totally deaf in a music school where all the exams are 'listening to a piece of music and commenting on it" and hoping they'll become Mozart as they 'have to learn how to do it'.

Some with an ASD do cope in mainstream if it's structured enough and if they have the right support. Many endure it in the same way as others might endure a multi-year neverending nightmare.

All the "oh but they have to learn to socialise and cope in the outside world" stuff is often so much nonsense. We cope best by learning to adapt our world, avoiding social groups and finding ways to cut out the total overload of group situations. I'm all for the right therapies to make our lives easier, but the "bung them in the school and let them learn" approach is often madness.

Each child and family needs to be able to make the right choice for that child, not told they have to like being put into a mainstream school with an occasional support worker/TA who's been given (say) a three hour tick-box course in that disability and is them supposedly an 'expert' (arrghh!) (and I know TAs try their best but they have no way to do their job properly with this little knowledge. They're often treated as babysitters, not teachers).

Even the 'experts' seem to struggle to know what they're talking about a lot of the time. I had a bizarre conversation with a man who claimed to be an 'expert' in autistic spectrum disabilities and said he knew far more about it than I did as he had a Certificate of some sort in it and had worked with people on the spectrum. Well, I've lived with it all my life and I'm married to a man with it and I've worked with lots on the spectrum too. Not to mention being an adviser for it. What good is a bloomin certificate if it builds that kind of arrogance? I'd have been more impressed if the advice he was giving wasn't breathtakingly wrong.

What was he suggesting Amber?

I came across someone who used the number of children he'd diagnosed as a claim for expertise into autism. I choked out loud

I do find myself pleased that ds1 is 'bad' enough to be able to access specialist provision I must admit.

Jimjams, he'd done a whole 'expert training course' leaflet for autism, but in a really jokey/sarcastic way. Except that those with an ASD can't often understand jokes and may take the advice really literally. So he was running the risk of someone following what he said and not realising it was a joke. Won't put down the specifics here as it's probably copyright. He was also telling service providers that they should set up entire care plans for children with LFA to the same level as a residential school might have to. Realistic in a residential setting or secure school setting perhaps, but not if it's a shop or a cinema etc! I got told my more realistic advice was 'laughable' and that people with Asperger syndrome were always trying to disadvantage people with LFA . There are some strange people out there

Amber, this is the other thing I was thinking wrt ASD but glad you said it first as I'm no expert: for a lot of kids with this condition, the very "mainstreamness" of mainstream is the problem. The large groups, the noise, the bustle, the constant and demanding social interaction, etc. By definition, to make that environment survivable for a child with ASD you have to remove them from the environment, often repeatedly and for large chunks of the day. No amount of support or adaptation touches the central problem which is that the child's Special Need is to be elsewhere.

NMC, re: makeup of your advisory committee - is it a general committee or an educational one? I was wondering if the council can provide you with some figures from their disability register - or if not if there are national figures, just saying how those disabilities break down. I bet that you can show your committee isn't representative as is. Isn't the underlying rate of ASD in the population supposed to be something like 10%? OK they won't all be known to the council but still the proportion on the register must be huge. And how many are elderly? How many have medical conditions rather than simple mobility problems? My guess is that your old guard is representing no more than 20% of the register.

M/S doesn't save money in all cases. My Sn school has had 7-8 kids in at year 7 on top statements and straight into the most able groups (1:5 staffing) and then had the statements reduced drastically because tehy no longer need teh support of the full time 1:1 they needed in m/s.
A SN school on site with m/s may work for some kids to access m/s more easily(odd lessons) rather than how we work with one day a week etc. BUT it doesn't help kids like Jimjams son.(I'd have such an image of him btw sounds just like a kid I used to work with -great fun)

I can't rememer much about the very first primary school I attended as I was under 6 when we moved, I do remember nearly giving the teacher a heart atack when I left the school grounds as she had told me to "wait outside (meaning in the corridor outside the classroom but how was I to know that?) for your older sister" .
The next primary school I went to, until I was 10, was, by accident really, an excellent place for me. It was a village school, small in size, about 100 pupils and five classes. You stayed for two years in one of the classes. Lot of structure and familiarity about it. I was picked up as being different there, but apart from a couple of incidents that at the time I was completely oblivious to I coped well in that environment. Things changed when we moved and though my parents deliberately chose the smallest primary school they could for me, the difference to me was rather strong. The place was twice the size in terms of pupils and the building for a start and the gap between myself and the other pupils was becoming more noticeable. Secondary school was even worse. I muddled through it because firstly I was uable to say if anything was bothering me or I needed anything. I react to things upsetting me by becoming withdrawn and quiet and from a teacher's point of view, whilst they might be concerned that a pupil is sat on her own constantly, if that pupil isn't causing any disruption it's easy just to let them get on with things .

The underlying rate of ASDs is supposed to be 1% (1 in 100 or thereabouts) of which the majority are supposed to be higher functioning (HFA/AS) but no-one seems to have exact numbers. I hear it's thought to be about 40:60 split but until they find all the missing adults, it's a guess.

At present,
63 out of 100 of adults with an ASD do not receive enough support to meet their needs
67 out of 100 have experienced anxiety because of a lack of support
Three quarters of adults with an ASD do not have any friends or find it hard to make friends
Three quarters of adults would like to spend more time with other people.
Only about 1 in 7 adults with an ASD are in full time employment
One in five are in part time employment
Two thirds are not working at all, not even in voluntary posts
Only one in seven live in their own flat or house with support, so that?s six out of seven that have no true ndependence/support.
Only one in four have a care plan
Three out of five can?t get support from authorities
Two out of five found out this is because there are no services for them
Seven out of ten of those who live on their own have been bullied or harassed
More than three out of five rely on family for money.

It apparently costs us about £28 BILLION a year in lost employment income and extra costs and therapies, instead of spending a tiny fraction of that to get it right in the first place. That's the same as £500 for every person in the UK, every year, to pick up the mess from not dealing with ASDs properly. sigh