Hi,
This is my first post here and I am looking for some advice on reviewing the EHCP the local authority have sent us. We feel its been put together in a very slap dash way. It's taken them months to do and and we feel we only got it in the end because we started to threaten them with action.
Our son is 18 and transitioning to college from his special school and we have two main areas of concern and were wondering if they could be addressed formally in the EHCP.
First is speech therapy. Our son finds it hard to make himself understood and has had speech and language therapy throughout his school career. There now isn't any included in the plan and it has been suggested to us if we want this to continue we should pay for it privately. Can we not push for this to be included?
The second is transportation. As well as college (which is 3 days a week) we have got him a place volunteering at a local charity but in both cases he will have to travel to get to these places. We get Direct Payments but have been told we can't use the money to pay for a taxi (for example) to get him to his volunteering so we are going ot have to pay so he can work there for free which seems rather unfair.
He is not safe on public transport or getting there himself as he ha a paranoid fear of dogs and if any were apporaching he may well just run into the road so some sort of transport is essential.
We know from personal experience here in Cheshire post-16 transport can be an issue as we fought a long campaign against the previous Tory run councils decision to impose charges. We lost but the recent election saw Labour take over and they supported us in our campaign and have now scraped the charges. However that is for transport to school sixth form not college post 18, so I was wondering if the EHCP could contain anything that said some sort of transport provision should be in place?
Either that or does anyone know if we can challenge the idea direct payments can't be used for this?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can contribute.