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ASD/PDA emergency home-schooling - reception

ukasddad

My son was just diagnosed with ASD (with PDA), and a recommendation to seek an ADHD diagnosis later. For what it's worth, the assessing paediatrician said he was not a good candidate for home schooling.

He is in reception (and under the mandatory school age), but cannot handle the classroom at all - he's currently doing 1h a day elsewhere in the school (with 2 staff), and they're working at gradually improving that (more time/less staff). We're aiming to request EHCNA this week, so we're 20 weeks at an absolute minimum from any more funding for more time in school, but I'm expecting various appeals and shenanigans.

My wife is off work currently and looking after him the rest of the day. My son is happy to try various learning at home for a reasonable period, so my wife has been doing that, despite it not exactly being her calling in life.

Some questions:

  1. She feels she shouldn't make the weekdays too fun overall - and is worried that if he has too much fun at home he just won't go in, or back, to school at all. My feeling is more that he needs to do fun things to counter-balance all the anxiety and suffering in his life, but ultimately we want him back in school (whether that's mainstream or special). How do you find this balance during this (hopefully interim) period?
  2. I believe that people fully bought into and setup for homeschooling aim to fit it all into a couple of hours each morning, meaning the rest of the day can be fun - or at least focus on the less academic side of things. Should we be trying that? Or, given his PDA, are we better off spreading it across the day and taking what we can?
  3. What should we realistically be asking for in terms of support for home schooling? Our SENCO seems good, but I guess this is the class teacher's responsibility. I assume there are written lesson plans, but they're probably not going to be accessible to someone with no teaching experience, and I doubt the teacher has time to translate them. He's ahead now, but I worry he could rapidly fall behind if we're, with the best will in the world, not teaching it the right way.

Thanks in advance.

  • Hello ukasddad,

    The NAS website has a guide on 'Home educating your child in England'. If you're in Wales or Scotland, there are guides on the website on home educating in those areas too. Here is the link for England:

    https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/education/education-choices/england/home-educating

    I hope this helps!

    Karin Mod

  • I'd say at his age learning should be fun in general anyway as children learn through play. I think as long as your wife isn't taking him out for really exciting things it's ok for him to have fun after his learning. And you're right he does need the fun to balance the anxiety. As far as to whether to spread out the learning, take your cues from your son. See what he responds best to. There's no general right or wrong answer, just what works for him. Support wise, they should be providing you with resources. For older children you'd have worksheets but reception can be very play based learning. They could give you some of the resources they use though and a general overview of what they're doing up until Christmas E.g. counting to 5, or 10 or wherever he would be up to. Matching shapes. Which phonics letters they are concentrating on. It is definitely the schools responsibility to help you with this as he is still down as attending that school. You haven't pulled him out. Any kind of reading to him, talking about shapes, colours, numbers etc will be helpful at that age though.