Hi. My 7 year old boy has just received his ASD diagnosis but he has been having great problems staying out of trouble at school for 18 months. He was forced to change mainstream schools at Christmas after a series of fixed term exclusions for attacking both staff and children there (mostly staff)led to them refusing to have him back. I get the impression that his outbursts were probably caused by his attempts at demand avoidance being thwarted or by his acute sense of unfairness. Often his major outbursts would occur the day after a more minor one. No amount of consequences, talking to, or incentives for good behaviour worked, probably because he just doesn’t have the coping skills in the moment where he needs them and cannot feel himself starting to lose it until he has already lost it.
Anyway he was doing really well at his new mainstream school until a couple of weeks ago. He only goes there two days a week and spends the other three days at a pupil referral centre who understand him very well and he has no problems at the centre. His new mainstream school is putting all the resources that they have his way in the two days he is there. He has one to one support all day every day. He needs this as he is really stressed out by even the idea of having to attempt work and so needs alternative activities when the work is too much. He needs constant adult direction as he has difficulty directing his own play and gets giddy if undirected. He needs micromanagement at break-times to avoid him getting giddy and disrupting other children’s play with his socially inappropriate demands to be in charge.
Now despite having all this support at his new school he has hurt people on four of the last five days he has been there. I don’t know what more the school can do to prevent this but clearly he is going to be excluded again unless this hurting can be stopped. I don’t know what to do. He doesn’t have any problems like this at the pupil referral unit but they can only take children part time. We are waiting for the result of a request for a statement but there are no special schools for KS1 in our area so he is going to have to be managed in mainstream at least until September.
