Published on 12, July, 2020
Sorry for the long post - but just need to give some background.
My son was diagnosed ASD just before lockdown (March 2020) in Y7. From Y6 he was being absent from class and this built up during Y7. Since returning after lockdown the situation is worse. He was on a reduced timetable - mornings only - and seemed fine with that. However, now, in Y9, he's rarely in school. He has anxiety and has had OCD - mainly intrusive thoughts - since Y5. This has got worse and used to lead to regular meltdowns. Now this seems to have changed a bit and he says that he mainly feels stressed and restless. He's currently with the Tavistock Autism department and has therapy for anxiety once a week but this is very long term (which is great) but we don't see his attitude to school changing much.
In class he says he feels stressed and overwhelmed. He told me this morning that 50% of that stress is due to him feeling that he doesn't know what's going on because of what he's missed. He's very bright (we think this is one reason he was able to get away with masking in primary school - they didn't worry about him because he was always able to get reasonable scores in tests).
He's very much a perfectionist and finds it difficult to just sit in class and try to get used to the discussions etc. He will obsess about not understanding every small detail and therefore come to the conclusion that if he doesn't understand everything he's going to do really badly. So, it's a vicious circle.
He has an EHCP for 25 hours but the support can only work if he's in school.
So now I'm thinking should we pay him for being in school? He's very motivated by money. It sounds terrible I know but at the moment we're getting worried as he's missed so much school. His GCSE course starts next year and if his approach continues like this he will miss out on that. We don't feel that he must be academic or needs to go to university etc but we want him to have options and we feel these are being narrowed - just that he doesn't have the foresight to know that. And what 14 year old really listens to their parents? He wants to be an architect and we've explained that this will mean studying and university but all that he can think about is not going to school right now because it's too stressful.
Any advice and suggestions are much appreciated. Thanks.
Greetings Rolu I hope you are doing well, as a Young adult who went through school without knowing if I had autism, and came out of school on their back end lost in life trying many different things to find out where I want to be (and I still am doing this!) sometimes I think the world does get caught up in degrees and qualifications and then discredits things such as apprenticeships and other methods of learning such as internships, these are good ways into jobs and provide a qualification, I have personally done 3 after school when I turned 16.However this doesnt help in the here and now, personally I would say if money is a motivation, many do a mix of the reward points and that equates to X amount of cash per week or month, if it is a short term solution and provides the onus of his own merit to earn it, keeping the "give and take" part, he gives his time and works to earn the points and at the end there is a reward, basically job structure,
There are many things that can be done suprisingly that I am learning after college, all school teaches you due to the fault of teachers only living in education all their lives is there are other ways to qualify for things of find your interest, one thing I would reccomend is maybe see if The Princes Trust can assist, I went under them once for a video editing course (was a wierd course as it was for editing on phones and i thought it was for PC) but they do many other courses apparently, even as for as helping set up your own business and they even once helped get me in contact with a content creator as an official medium to get a response to help me potentially pursue content creation as a career path, they may have contacts in the architectual industry who he could contact and speak with to help formulate a plan, sadly in high school, most of the options of lessons are mind numbingly boring and I cannot blame him, i found it immensley boring in high school, it wasn't until college I was free to choose what I want.
Now to mention the lessons, it could possibly be as going through and working in education, knowing that teachers a lot of the time have 0 drive and their lessons reflect that, being monotonous and monotone, they have nothing that causes engagement other than them going "who knows the answer" or deciding to pick on someone to answer, this causes the brain to switch off and lose focus (i know this because i did that and have done so in my current apprenticeship) so it may be worth speaking with if he has a TA who understands the topic to maybe introduce it in a more engaging way to your son, maybe with games or things such as Kahoot, which for some reason gets kids competitive to answer questions and get their name on the screen leaderboard, i even once tried this and got so competetive and got top spot on a time table, this was on finance stuff too, i have no idea about finance and spend most of my time just spinning on my chair!)