Coping with school refusal

Is there a parents group or local NAS branch in your area? The little pink maps on the Home and Community pages of the NAS website are supposed to help you find local services (being London-centric the first things will be in London so you have to scroll down). Also you may have to experiment a lot with search terms.

Even if there isn't a group near you, it is worth asking the nearest as they might know of a nearer group starting up or not well publicised.

Parents groups and NAS branches are mainly about parents - chances to meet up, talks on autism related subjects, courses on aspects of support, often a small autism relarwed reference library, access to expertise. Recalling your reply to me before, you want help for yourself, and that is a way of getting it.

Another thing is, if there is a university near you they probably have special education needs training and a resource library. Schools in your area will have a resource somewhere, at a college probably, for SEN information. Sometimes they are able to be flexible and give advice or let you read books they have.

Hi Oners,

Have you read Tony Attwood's Complete Guide to Aspergers? As an adult with the syndrome I can vouch for the fact that he describes the syndrome in a very accessible way with lots of quotes from sufferers that may help you understand the problem from your son's point of view.

Thank you, Sweet son o mine.  I hope your son gets the support he deserves.

My 15 year old autistic son in his final year and total none attendance. Honestly feel your pain. Daily meltdowns.  I have had to back off for my own sanity and that of my other children. The school are doing very little i think they have given up. He is so clever its such a waste. 

I have asked CAMHS to help me find someone who can home school him like a home tutor. I will let you know how this unfolds. My son is one of 5 children 3 of which are spectrum but it doesnt impact their lives but my 15 year old really struggles. So sad he is so clever

Thank you, Yorkshirelass.  All good advice. I've not heard of the Cygnet Course so I'll look into that too.

Thank you, Longman.

I think we are making progress within the school.  I removed my son from his previous school back in March because of their failure to recognise his impairments and their inability to make adjustments for him. He is now in a much more supportive school with an EHCP, a one-to-one teaching assistant and lots of input from our OT.

I was really looking for advice for me.  I find his school refusal very difficult to cope with and I was looking for any advice other parents might be able to give me on how they cope with it.  

Thanks

While a very difficult issue to resolve, school refusal could have some identifiable causes, and if my long distant recollections of school are valid today, you might be able to explore some of this.

Classrooms are collective participation environments. If you are on the autistic spectrum you cannot hope to keep up with this. For one thing there's a sensory constraint on how much you can take in, and also some limitation in what you absorb from collective instruction (ie when the teacher addresses the whole class). You can be struggling to follow the lesson.

Under stress, such as above, you tire easily, and concentration may diminish rapidly, and even daydreaming is likely, so you are more than usually likely to have attention drawn to you for not paying attention. Also some autistic children pay attention with their ears rather than their eyes, and appear to the teacher to be looking away.

Humour in a classroom can be particularly difficult to follow, and a child with autism may not understand it. Laughter they might perceive as directed at them.

If you are conspicuously not keeping up with what is going on, you are likely to get teased for it, by the teacher and the class. I wonder if teachers' understanding of autism is sufficient to realise the adverse impact this has.

If you have sensory overload/high sensitivity a classroom can be very uncomfortable - noise, bright light, close proximity to others, lots of people talking (especially when there isn't a teacher in the room).

Routes within school are likely to be noisy, with a lot of jostling for space. Similarly dining room queues, changing rooms, cloak rooms, toilets, recreational breaks, gymnasium etc. They are also places where teachers may see less, and where a different child gets teased or ridiculed or bullied.

Bullying is a common experience of people on the spectrum, and equality and disability awareness doesn't seem to stop children and teenagers picking on the "different" kid when no-one in authority is looking on. School can be an utter nightmare for children on the spectrum, just on account of the teasing and bullying.

Communal toilets are one of the worst places for this kind of bullying. A lot of people on the spectrum acquire a deep seated fear of public toilets probably from school experience.

Clare Sainsbury's "Martian in the Playground - understanding the schoolchild with Asperger's Syndrome" 2000 (Lucky Duck Publishing ISBN 1 873 942 08 7) has a lot of school environment insights, including a very good section on bullying p72-100 of my 2004 reprint.

While school refusal might well be just deep seated and inexplicable, some understanding could be gained by looking into possible causal factors, if your child will disclose these things. Often teachers have no idea about this sort of thing.