Hi everyone.
My son was born at the end of June 2010, and will be starting primary school August next year.
He's currently in a private nursery. After being diagnosed with Autism we considered moving him to a specialist nursery, but we felt that it took so long for him to settle in the current place that this would be unhelpful to his development over the last few months. The nursery staff he currently has are incredible, and great with Jacob. He's making great progress especially in the last 3 months.
The Local Authority have been somewhat slow in getting involved. We mentioned to their education team, again, about 2-3 weeks ago that we were concerned he would need a space in a special education needs unit. Something happened last week as we suddenly got a visit from an educational psychologist, and then got told we're having a cross-team meeting next Tuesday, which would be used to decide the best route for Jacob.
We believe there are two options to us, going ahead (it would be good to know if there's other options?):
- Go into mainstream education with help given on-site at his local primary school.
- Go into a special education unit with the option to transition in future years depending on progress.
My major concern is Jacob's "immaturity" - he's clearly quite sharp at certain things, however most of his language and capabilities are perhaps at the stage of a 2 year old. He currently has an extremely extremely short attention span (although we're managing to slowly build on this), and we know this will make formal learning very difficult for him and his teacher(s).
What I would prefer would be that Jacob had a deferred entry into primary school, on the grounds that he'd be more suited to it 12 months down the line. I've been casually told that this is flat-out impossible. Any further discussion about this is immediately shut down by the local authority.
I'm not concerned about Jacob's academic achievement, I just want him to enjoy school... as it stands I just can't see how he's ready.
In the year that he's outside of school we would prefer to see him placed in a nursery unit, or we could pay for private nursery / tuition (would be tough for us but we'd manage). We currently pay for ABA therapy privately, and would be looking to do more of this in the following year.
Both myself and my wife are a bit confused - we don't know what's feasible, or what's best...
Hope you can help,
Alan
