Busyknitter

jen,we have Direct Payments. It was a bit of a palaver to set up; the main delay is finding your own carer and getting them CRB checked. The bank account was a bit of a faff as well. However, now it all in place it is absolutely wonderful. We are in complete control of the funding we have been allocated and organise respite flexibly to suit ourselves and our son's carer. I wouldn't want it any other way. For the record, we asked for a social services assessment August last year, had the assessment done in October, the funding was approved in November but it took till April this year to get everything organised. To be fair there was quite a delay simply because the person that we approached to be the carer got married in January, so she was somewhat preoccupied for a while If you aren't scared by the prospect of a bit of admin work, then I would strongly recommend Direct Payments. Our council has an arrangement with a charity that supports disabled people and their carers with DP admin. So they organise all the payroll side of things and tell me how much I owe the Inland Revenue. It's called Rowan and a lot of authorities use them. BK

Hi Emum My 3.5 yr old rips his own books up. It's usually a book that has been a complete favorite, so it may be a response to some kind of sensory overload. But to be perfectly honest i think I just he does it carelessly every now and again for the sheer fun of it. Fraid I've got no advice on how to stop it. Once a book has had more than a couple of pages taken out, we bin it. So I'm always scouring bric-a-brac stalls for second-hand picture books. He has also recently started to home in on DVD cases BK

Hello, I'm Mum to T, who is 3.5 and autistic (fairly low functioning, no speech yet). He has a Statement which provides 1:1 support in mainstram nursery and that is working well at the moment. But we have recently decided that he would be best placed in the long run in a special school and are hopeful that he will be offered a place at a very good LEA-run school for ASD sometime in the next year. We are also waiting on an appeal for DLA Having had a nose around the forum, I suspect most folks here are dealing with high functioning ASD rather than our end of the Spectrum. But I thought I'd pop in and say Hi anyway. BK