Hello,
I was wondering if any of you have similar experience with your school, and if so what did you do? What can we do in the situation as below.
My son has been diagnosed with ADHD and Autism and is now in year 2 mainstream primary school. He is on SEN register but doesn't have EHCP yet (we have applied for it).
He does have some challenging behaviour as you'd expect from a child with ADHD and ASD. We had really bad spell of behaviour around Christmas/New Year when his little brother arrived home, and we have put that to that, and now we have also put that to past, as his behaviour has improved drastically lately. He is being medicated for his ADHD and his symptoms have reduced leaving us with more obvious ASD symptoms such as anxiety and obsessiveness.
My son has been excluded from school a number of times for reasons which are the same as symptoms of both of the disorders, they have also put him on half days durning SAT's exams for year 6's and we have agreed to that to help school out. But this has carried on for another 3 weeks afterwards until we have put written complaint to school and governors.
All this seems very wrong and unfair to us but not as bad as the next ( current ) thing school has come up with.
They have created this ''Learning corner'' in the school library where my son spends - all - of his learning time and only socialises with his friends during the breaks and lunch. He is not allowed to enter school like other children do, instead he has to go through the office and straight to his corner, so he doesn't even see his friends in the morning either. He is being taught by a TA's most of the time and that also sounds wrong to me. Now I have nothing but praise and respect for TA's but they are not qualified teachers are they?
There's no sound proofing in the library and there are other students and staff, and parents using it while my son is sitting there trying to learn! That must be so distracting!
We have raised this issue with school of course, to which we had response along the lines ''There's nothing else we can do as we have duty of care to other children in class'' etc.
We have requested that they put some other children with my son in the Library so this whole situation then becomes a group activity rather then my son all by himself, to which the response was ''Can't do that as we would have to have written permission from other parents''. We have not given any permission to isolate our son.
We have written to the Governors and the response was that ''school will arrange meeting''. Quiet frankly I don't want to attend another meeting. I would rather escalate our complaint further but I don't know where to or if its even worth it.
Did you have similar experience where school just ''shoves'' ASD child aside and hopes for the best? I can understand that school has limited resources etc, etc. but why is it my son paying for it by being completely isolated from him friends for most of the school day?!
Please share your thoughts and experiences if you can.
Thank you.