Canopus

Success is often achieved by understanding the ins and outs of any system and then maninipulating the system to your advantage. Mind you many middle class people may well have little knowledge of the technicalities of the education system. I have a suspicion that certain special needs provision is a postcode lottery and varies from LEA to LEA. An LEA covering a middle class area may well have people who are more knowledgable about AS then an LEA covering a working class area. The internet adds a whole new dimension to things as it allows access to information that would otherwise not be available. If the internet had existed 20 years ago then my time at school would probably have been different.

There could be some validity to this statement although I reckon that AS in working class communities is overshadowed by more prominent problems. I am tempted to say that a kid with AS who lives in a more middle class area will be more easily recognised as having AS than a similar kid in a working class area.

I don't know if sufficient data exists to answer any of these questions on AS but someone here may reveal something. 1. Does AS only affect European people or can it affect people of other races such Indian, Chinese etc? 2. Is AS more prevalent in children from working, lower middle, or upper middle class backgrounds? 3. Is AS more prevalent in children whose parents have strong interests in things themselves or is it more prevalent in children whose parents have no strong interests?

At my special needs secondary school, about half the kids had been held back a year despite the school claiming it was for high intelligence people. The headmaster seemed to take delight in making people repeat a year if they failed the internal exams or generally underperformed. He tried to make me repeat Y9 but my LEA refused and stated they would withdraw me from the school if I didn't move into Y10.

Does an LEA have the right to make a child repeat a year?

Is it one of these KMX Karts as in http://www.kmxkarts.co.uk I would have liked one as a kid, but at the price I doubt if my parents would have bought me one assuming they were around 20 or so years ago.

Young teenagers can get prosecuted for attacking people. I assaulted a classmate at school and the matter nearly ended up in court. When the police arrested me they told me that I had committed a very serious crime and could receive a prison sentence. As far as the law is concerned assault is assault and AS doesn't come into the equation.

My parents bought me a dictation machine back in 1986 in the attempt to improve my writing because I could say something but had difficulty getting it on paper. It was very useful and my writing began to improve as a result, but sadly my school would not let me use it in class. The teacher claimed that talking disturbed lessons and that the machine attracted attention of the other kids who wanted to use it as well. My parents had a word with the LEA about it but they were not convinced that I really needed it at school.

It definitely looks like dyspraxia to me. Bikes are something that dyspraxic kids have serious difficulty with. I couldn't ride a bike when I was 9 years old and my LEA thought I was disabled because they couldn't understand how a 9 year old was incapable of riding a bike unless they were disabled. I have a technique that actually works and it will probably take me longer to write it than it will take for your son to learn to ride his bike. If you are interested I could post it here.

I think this is a common situation as gifted and talented usually just means excelling in school subjects or in artistic and musical areas. If one possesses a high level of knowledge in something academic that is outside of the school curriculum, then quite often it goes by unnoticed or is simply seen as a sideline. My expertise when I was at school was electronics and computer programming yet my potential was totally untapped and largely ignored by the school and LEA.

I think I know what this means. Despite being a maths wizard myself - although probably not to the same extent as Com - I only got a B at GCSE because I was so advanced I saw through much of the detail that examiners were looking for. The coursework was another problem in that the investigation (a number series) was not solvable using just GCSE knowledge yet I solved it in less than a day after the paper was given to me. I could do 3D trigonometry and solve quadratic equations when I was just 8. Much of my mathematical knowledge from then on came from my interest in electronics. By the time I was 14 I could do differentiation, integration, matrices and complex numbers.

My mother doesn't like black toilet seats.

So can he do things like calculus and solving quadratic equations? AS level is quite remarkable for someone in Y8, most of which are still struggling with fractions and percentages. Has he been entered in for GCSE yet, or will the school only let him take it at the end of Y11?

At least schools nowadays allow or even prefer that work is done on a computer. I had terrible problems with writing at junior school, but produced the work more easily on a computer. Quite often I would do my homework on a computer, but my school wasn't very happy with a printout as they preferred it written with a pen. I was never allowed to use a computer in class to produce written work with. Is it really true that some dyspraxic/AS kids nowadays are given laptops to use in class instead of pens?

Technically dyspraxia and AS are two completely separate conditions. It can be possible to have AS but not dyspraxia or dyspraxia but not AS. I think that in the case of having both AS and dyspraxia then the dyspraxia "came first" and exacerbated the AS.

I always wanted to be home educated when I was at primary school but my parents wouldn't consider it. A retired headmaster claimed that infant school was a waste of time for me and I agree with him. Home education was quite rare back in the 80s but appears to be more popular nowadays. I would definitely consider parents using it if a school fails to provide for their child's needs or their child is unhappy and would prefer to be home educated. Does anyone have any info on how to take GCSEs before Y11? In state schools it is almost impossible to take GCSEs early, but every now and then I have read that some kid gets an A* in some subject well before they are 16.

One problem with home education is that it can be difficult to take GCSEs in certain subjects that require practical work with specialised equipment rarely found at home. After a period of home education, I ended up attending a boarding school because continuing home education would have been detrimental to science subjects that I was interested in and wanted GCSEs in.

As a kid I found things to do with toilets and staining and burning settees amusing.

Do most people with AS have a quirky sense of humour and find certain things funny that shouldn't really be funny?

I hope not to sound like a deterrent, but I attended a special needs boarding school and didn't enjoy it. The place was generally unpleasant and I didn't think that it catered to my special needs all that well. I did not like or trust one of the headmasters. He made people live under fear. Perhaps if the school was AS specific and wasn't run by a deluded headmaster who thought he was running a small version of Eton complete with traditional public school culture, then I might have thought better of the place. Despite my bad experience, I am not against boarding school although many of the special needs schools of the 70s, 80s and early 90s have thankfully closed due to changes in LEA policy once they found out how unsuccessful the places really were. Any surviving special needs schools are probably run by people who understand the special needs of the kids as opposed to taking an iron fist discipline or public school culture approach.

My time at school was hell and I suffered from undiagnosed depression as a result. I became statemented for SEN when I was 8 and my LEA had no idea what was wrong with me and why I had so many problems that they had never encountered anyone else with before. I wasn't aware that anything was wrong with me until I was about 10. I did not enjoy school and found much of the work boring and trivial, but I considered myself academically able so didn't think there was anything wrong with the intellectual side of things so didn't need extra help with spelling and maths like my younger brother did. I was bad at PE but then held the attitude that different people are better at different things and that trigonometry rather than team sports was my strong point. I also had unconventional interests but couldn't see what was wrong with that. My father stated they were extreme but my counterargument was that he had no interests and was just a couch potato. When it came to issues like handwriting I just thought the teachers were nitpicking over minor trivial details. When I was 10 I seriously started to think there was something wrong with me and that I was genuinely different to my brother and my classmates at school. The only problem was what was that something? The LEA and several psychologists had no explanation other than I was lazy, clumsy, disorganised, and held a bad attitude at times. I started to think that there was some psychological condition that was yet to be discovered. Sadly this exacerbated the situation as my parents and the LEA thought that I was going deluded. I only found out about AS from the support department at work in 2004 when I mentioned I had possible dyslexia because it was taking me a long time to produce a report. My LEA steadfastly believed that dyslexia did not exist even though my parents suspected me of being dyslexic at the time. I let the support department read my statement from 1989 and they claimed I could be slightly dyslexic but also suffered from (undiagnosed) AS. I had never heard of AS prior to this. AS certainly is linked to autism, but I think that it really deserves to be considered as a condition in its own right. The reason I think it is being classified under autism is probably because the general public and the education community have difficulty in getting a grip on certain new things unless they are packaged in a format in which they are familiar with.

I wouldn't say the issue is subjective. I think that the social problems from AS occur mainly in childhood and decrease once one becomes an adult. The adult in question may be unsuited to certain careers where image and excellent social skills are of paramount importance such as stockbroking, but they will avoid such careers and choose something more suited to them such as biochemistry research. If a kid is obsessed with Triumph Dolomites and take little interest in conventional activities such as football then they are likely to be perceived as weird and probably have difficulty relating to their classmates at school. If an adult is obsessed with Triumph Dolomites then they are likely to be perceived as a classic car enthusiast and find it easy to relate to people with the same interest.

A few months ago I discussed AS with a retired headmaster who had been interested in the condition since the 1960s. He tried to publish a few papers in education journals during the 70s and 80s about kids he knew who had obsessive interests often in conjunction with behavioural problems and poor performance at school. His conclusion was that there was a new and quite rare psychological condition, but sadly the papers were rejected by the editors as describing one off cases or kids who were just downright wayward.

I consider AS to be a condition in its own right and not a variant or type of autism. I'm not sure whether social dyslexia is a good definition of AS or not. It might be applicable for children at school, but many adults with AS are not socially inept providing they are with the right type of people.

There was a time when I went through a phase of regularly destroying work. In most instances it was because it wasn't up to standards or because a teacher had complained over a minor trivial matter that was difficult to rectify such as the handwriting. Even today I sometimes rip something apart completely and rebuild it from scratch when things go wrong. Did you know that Charles Babbage was an obsessive perfectionist? Quite often he would smash up a computer that he spent months building because it didn't work to his expectations.