Hello all,
this is a very long and complicated journey so I’ll try and keep to the important details.
My daughter is 12 and she was thought the be showing autistic traits while in nursery when she was around 3/4. Her teacher at that time told us that she was experiencing what she thought were behaviours pertaining to autism and that it may be beneficial to have her assessed.
We were going backwards and forwards for 8 years for assessment and she was quite literally forgotten about. She was finally diagnosed when she was 11. By this time she’d had zero support through primary school and had started senior school.
She started off ok in senior school but it started becoming evident that she was struggling, as she was again having very little support. She was coming out of school and having meltdowns outside the school gates, people were singling her out for being ‘different’. She had no friends and she’d began to draw pictures of herself hanging. To find these pictures make my heart break.
She has tactile defensiveness and can not touch paper, she has to cover her hand to touch paper because ‘it makes her feel sick’ this makes her writing and drawing look a bit ‘immature’ for her age. She drew a piece of work and the teacher deemed it ‘not good enough’ screwed it up and put it in the bin and told her to do better.
It got to a point that I was terrified she’d actually hurt herself, and she was distressed every day buy one thing and another, so I removed her from the school roll and began homeschooling.
We have been waiting for an educational psychologist to try and get her an EHCP and I was also hoping that we could get her into a school that was more suited to her needs. I had an initial conversation with an educational psychologist who told me that I made a mistake taking her out of school as I had not give the school a chance to make the issues right, and that this may impact the decision to give my daughter an EHCP.
I was a bit taken aback by this as I felt they were saying my daughter had to remain in school to suffer to prove a point to these people. To prove that she actually needs help and support. I am still awaiting for my daughter to be assessed by an educational psychologist, but now I’m feeling quite deflated and feel she won’t be getting the support I think she needs. She’s desperate to get back into some type of education but she’s scared.
Can anyone offer any advice perhaps?
Thank you for listening
