Canopus

Tell me exactly what your qualifications are and what other skills and talents you have? What particular course or subject do you want to study?

University isn't the be all and end all of everything. Unless you are aiming for a career in medicine, or law, or something where it's next to impossible to access without a degree then there are often better and more rewarding alternatives.

How time flies!! My advice is not to spend too much time comparing your son with other 18 year olds holding boozy parties who can't wait to leave home. In a few years time things might have changed beyond what is imaginable at the moment.

Has anybody ever heard of Penelope Trunk? http://www.penelopetrunk.com

Teachers with AS are prone to bullying by other teachers although some are highly respected by kids.

You will probably find most teachers with AS working in higher education or as tutors. Primary school teaching isn't a career that appeals to many people with AS.

I have a few point to make. Lane discipline. Something I have always had difficulty with. There must be some art to reading the road to identify which lane goes in which direction at junctions. Large roundabouts. I found them very confusing and every roundabout appears to have its own idiosyncratic rules. Teaching the student how to use the tachometer when changing gears is a great help. Most cars nowadays have one fitted but driving instructors don't always explain it. I have been wondering whether automatics might be more popular in the future. We have a generation of teenagers that's lost much experience in shifting gears and driving instructors know it all too well.

The same welfare reforms would have happened under a Labour or Lib-Dem government. I've been painfully trying to explain this for many years that Westminster governments are not sovereign, meaning that the party in power has full control over its actions, but instead, are heavily manipulated by external and higher order powers. Examples of these powers include: The European Union. The United Nations. The US Government - via the Special Relationship. The World Trade Organisation. Big business and the global financial elite. A few years ago I had an article about how the World Trade Organisation considered Britain to be too generous when it came to handing out benefits and urged the (then Labour) government to tighten up in order to increase competitiveness of UK Plc. As Britain is a member of this club it has to abide by its rules and requests no matter which political party is running the country. Another option is to withdraw from the WTO (which we can do) but none of the establishment parties desire to do so. We have never had it in Britain. We're not Switzerland! The British political system is an elective dictatorship based on 18th century ideology when our MPs were drawn from a pool of obscurely educated and out of touch aristocrats.

I think that's a very sensible strategy to take. An AS support group teaches kids social skills and life skills but attitudes towards it by parents vary considerably. Some parents think it's the best thing since sliced bread and accept that schools are unable or unwilling to teach the social skills and life skills that kids with AS require, now or in the foreseeable future. Other parents are disgusted and dismayed that they have to resort to using services outside of the mainstream school system and believe that it is the responsibility of the school to provide such services. My primary schools in the pre-NC era were unwilling to alter the curricula or teaching styles to accommodate my SEN. They wouldn't even let me do written work on a computer because of problems with handwriting. I don't consider this pre-NC era to be 'good old days'. Serious questions of the sort you mention were raised decades ago and continue to be raised each year.

Wrong. Under the 1996 Education Act it is the PARENTS who are responsible for a child's education. Not the school. A perfect A1 education from the state school system is NOT a God given right.

This is the crux of the matter. Most NT people can pick up certain social skills as they go along and the mainstream education system is set up with the assumption that this happens. People with AS are unable to pick up these social skills as they go along as they have difficulty reading people, are blind to subtle signs, etc. The only way they will learn these social skills is if they are explicitly taught them in a similar way that academic subjects are taught. The mainstream school system doesn't offer any SEN courses in these social skills for kids with AS. Very little of the existing social skills services that schools provide are applicable or relevant to the problems affecting kids with AS. I think what we (as in the AS community) needs to do is to create some social skills programmes for kids with AS. Initially they will be offered to parents for teaching outside of the school system. If they can be proven to be effective then it will be possible to persuade schools to start offering them as part of their SEN services.

The terms academic achievement and social skills lack precise definitions. Exactly. It's a highly polarised either or argument. You certainly make a valid point concerning LEAs. It's been in the back of my mind for some time that the government simply doesn't want kids with SEN from succeeding academically. The state education system has given strong priority to the academic side of things from the outset. There are many critics of the education system, and not always from the AS sphere, who say that this heavy academic bias is responsible for many of Britain's social problems. These same critics also say that sending kids to school to learn social skills is ludicrous as much of the social skills they learn at school have little relevance to life as an adult and generate positively undesirable behavioural traits from the point of view of a citizen. Some parents home educate their kids for the primary objective of learning the right social skills to become a citizen. They think that as long as their kids can read, do basic maths, think straight, and find out information for themselves then that's all they need to know on the academic side of things apart from whatever subjects interest them.

What you have done is taken a specific event and turned into a generalised argument and poll where neither academic achievements nor social skills are defined. A better approach would be to nab the school for failing to provide for SEN on that day.

Is this supposed to be some trick question?

That's worse than when I started as an undergrad in 1995. I would say that about 3 out of 4 students on my course brought a computer with them. Many were 386 or 486 machines running Windows 3 and a handful of students owned Amigas or really old Apple Macs. The uni had a room with about 25 internet connected computers running Netscape. The library catalogue was a text based application that ran on an ancient minicomputer accessed using dumb terminals with monochrome screens. My science teacher was a photography freak and had a darkroom in a cupboard under the stairs back in 1990. I wonder what his view is of digital cameras. Dial phones are available on ebay. I miss the telephone network back in the days of electromechanical telephone exchanges with all its quirks and clicks and crackles. It could be pain at times but the modern digital system is just so boring in comparison.

All kids who attend state schools have to study according to the NC which is organised by age rather than ability. Extra help and support is available for kids that are behind but next to nothing is available for kids who are ahead of the NC and find the work intellectually unchallenging. I dispute certain aspects of this. Adults are free to choose where they live and work. If they are encountering problems with the people in the neighbourhood or at work that they cannot resolve then they are free to find an alternative place to live or work. Kids at school do not get this choice so they are stuck with difficult people until they leave.

You've beaten me. There's some really old episodes on YouTube that I watch just to look at household decor and the clothes people are wearing that are nostalgic in a rather strange way.

But where do you draw the line? How is challenges defined? Do you mean intellectual challenges or do you mean having to fit into and comply with a rigid system and constantly fight off bullies?

I have noticed this and wondered whether David Cameron has deliberately copied Blair as part of a let failure copy success strategy.

My parents hold the view that coping is an important part of school life. They think that learning to stick up for yourself and survive playground politics is just as important as learning the academic stuff because it prepares you for handling office politics at work.

The legal issues surrounding home education can be found here. http://www.aspergersupport.org.uk/legal/ishelegal.html

I have a serious dislike and distrust of Facebook. It's an invasion of privacy and is run as a profit making business by selling personal information to other businesses. The people and organisations behind Facebook also don't make pleasant bed time reading. I can PM you more information about this if you want. Facebook does not really do anything that other technology doesn't do. Call me old fashioned if you wish, but I much prefer forums such as this over Facebook. I consider them to be more secure and are less likely to leak personal information to third parties or government agencies. They are more likely to be run by trustworthy people who see them as a personal venture and not as a profit making business.

When politicians etc. speak in front of TV cameras they usually move their hands in certain ways according to what they are talking about. Does anybody have any good information about these hand movements? I believe that they are also used in job interviews or other situations as a means of reinforcing the speaker's message, and failure to implement the right hand movements could be viewed as a sign of lack of sincerity or confidence.

I was having terrible thoughts a few months ago that history was not on his side. I have encountered or have been informed about teenagers with AS with similarities to Jay, and few of them manage to achieve half decent GCSE results. History shows that the best GCSE results tend to come from the 'mild cases' of AS in mainstream school; home educated; or those who took the GCSEs at college. I haven't scrutinised my collection of GCSE results from over the years but I don't think there is anyone who is similar to Jay who has managed A grades for science subjects yet.

A lot of adults with AS outwardly appear miserable because they were bullied whilst younger for having an inappropriate or immature sense of humour.