bensmum2

I appreciate your replies , this isnt about how much the school costs , it is actually a non maintained out of area special school which is named on my sons statement after the LEA failed to provide a suitable school locally. it is about choice and the fact that his peers who are in mainstream colleges arent forced to do PE or swimming and they only have to attend a few days a week , whereas my son is out of the house with travelling 9 hours 5 days a week , The shcool have chosen all his courses doe him , even forcing him to do english literature for a full year when i objected to it , and thye have even chosen his 6th form courses even though i asked for a meeting to help decide what he should do. His choice has been taken aay x

My son is 17 and in his first few months of 6th form at a special school, he isnt' coping well at all, i have spoekn to him and one of the things he is struggling with is they are encouraging him to "grow up" and take more responsibility for himself , but on the other hand forcing him to do PE and Swimming , both of which he hates. He talks to other people on the internet a lot of whom are at college now and only have to attend a few days a week and are not made ot do pe and get a lot of time off whne he is in all week full time and out of the house 9 1/2 hours every day with travelling. Can i insist he drops pE and swimming ?and that they adjust his timetable so that he gets at least one day off in the week like others his age ?

Hi yes he had extra time and a laptop and scribe , but they put him in for the higher papaers and i knew he wudnt be able to do them, but thye ignored me. i was ocnstantly on their backs last year about why i wasnt seeing any homeowrk or any coursework and thye just kept saying hesup to date and doing well, but if thtas were the case he wudnt have got an f or a u in 2 of his exams , and yesterday they told me more lies which i have found out so am taking this much further , they have entered him for an AS level exam when he has only been on the course 4 months and off for most of that, they told me this is the only time that exam is available but i have found out its done in may as well, they say he wotn pass it anyway , but to em thats just setting him up to fail again x

Thankls ally , i know i shouldnt have let it go this long but he was doing ok, and thne he broke his ankle in the middle of his gcse's and so other things were prioritised and i just presumed they wanted to see how well he was doing before they commited themselves to the changes, the changes actually included less help as at the time i didnt feel he eeded it , but the ankle injury has set him bakc so much , his anxiety has coem back andalthough the school were constantly reassuring me his work was fine and he was set for good grades in the gcse's , he didnt' do well at all, and thye started saying well his course work was no good. So now i have lost confidence in the school as well. He also now goes aprt time to a mainstream ands he isnt coping wiht thta either his old sickness has eturned , i want to sort this out so do need a copy of this revised statemetn so i know exactly what he should have in place . Nice ot hear from you anyway how is your son doing? Hope things are much better for you all x

At my sons review in DDecember 2011, the lea agreed to amend his statement , in june 2012 i contacted them as we still hadn't received anything. They said it would eb amended after his GCSE results in the summer/ We have now had this years review which the lEA didnt attend and still no amended statement. I rnag them today and they said they will "look into it" . so we hav ebeen waiting over 12 months for an amended statment . any advice please ?

Hi Again just noticed in my post above i put they can withdraw the 1 to 1 but i meant to say if it is in the statement they CAN'T withdraw it without your consent at least , if its in the statemwnt theya r elegally bound to do it, x

If he cant cope with going out in the yard he shud be provided with a safe place in school, and if he is statemented this could be included as part of that , if 1 to 1 is written in, they can "withdraw it to give him more freedom" without u agreeing, appealing to sendist will take time and p[robably not get you anywhere , concentrate on sorting the problema he has in the yard to make life easier for him x

of the school wont ask for an assessment from the edpsych , or even if they will , do a parental reuest for a statutory assessment, my son suffered froms chool refusal, same symptoms as your boy , so bad we had to de register him and home school , years 7,and 8 he only spent half the tiem there and they promised loads of helpw hcih never materialised, they went so far as to blame us and threaten to put him on the child protection register even though we clearly had disgnosis of psycho somatic symptoms and school refusal, out of interest he also couldnt not cope with Frenc , whatever we tried and i believe this can be an asd trait , foreign langua ged. I home schooled him thorugh year 9, he stopped vomiting , the paisn reduced, he evens topped wetting teh bed which he had been doing for 8 years, i had ot go private twice for a proper diagnosis, and we had to go all the way to tribunal for a school, we got a statement on pour 4th attempt but they still tried to put him bakc in a mainstream school with over 800 pupils, in the end we won at tribunal, as the lea couldnt provide anywhere suitable for him we got a non maintained out of area special school and he hasnt looked back, no more illness and he has changed os much, he still doesnt do french cos he just cant/ i got a lot of help from IPSEA thye have advice lines and came to tribunal with me. They even have sample letters that u can copy. if u get refused , appeal and go as far as u can , Good luck x

well , my friends son got awarded lower mobility but no care, but better than nothing and they owe her over a year in benefit, its like they totally ignored his IEP and depression and ocd, but he is 16 now and his appeal was dealt with as if he were still 15 so now he us unable to make a main meal for himself comes into play , i have told my friend to get a new referral to camhs and then we will do a change of circumstances , all the Panel concentrated on was could he use the toilet and wash himself , didnt even take into account how much verbal help he needs with over washing and refusing to eat food he hasnt seen prepared and stuff liek that, but small success xx

i really appreciate your response to this , i love the littel 2thoughts" u put at the end , will post agein when we get the results should be today hopefully , win or lose i think i am going to question the qualifications of the dLA tribunal panel further x

yes i agree diagnosis alone doesnt entitle one to DLA it is the degree of help they may need over and above anothe rperson of a simialr age and obviously the type of help, and i am not expecting them to be experts in all disabilities just to have basic knowledge of the problems people are likely to experience, or at least one of the panel members to have such knowledge x

Hi Thank you for replying, i have been helping people with Dla forms just as a personal fried for many years , i have only ever had one refusal and that was overturned after asking for the decision to be looked at again and i myself am registered blind and have been for 10 years, i got dla for 2 years at higher care rate then when i had to reapply they reduced it to lower, their reason was i must be used to ebing blind after 2 years !!! You should have heard my response to that, needless to say, once again that was overturned when i applied for a review.This tiem was for my friends aspie 16 year old, i applied last feb for them, they didnt turn it down till july and it didnt get changed at review so yesterday was the tribunal , there were 89 pages which they didnt evens eem to have read, one of the reasons for refusal was that he didnt get substantially more help at school than other children of his age, but he has an iep for 2 hours a day, plus extra support before and after school and at lounchtime, i argues that thta was substantially more and the panel said they thought it was 2 hours a week !! so even the disability aware lady didnt really seem to know how to read an iep. personally i foight for 8 years for my aspie son, now 16 to get into a special school, i went to tribunal over that and in our case notes there were 599 pages, it was really obvious that all panel members knew every single page and they were brilliant and asked for clarification of anythign they werent sure of.needless to say we won and he is now very happy in a class of 6 coming up to his gcse's, but this dla panel just really didnt seem to understand what we were talking about , we had spent ages talking about the child refusing to move without his mum and then when i summed up i just called it seperation problems, and one of them said what are seperation problems ! we still havent had a decision apparently it's "in the post" and they wont discuss it over the phone, but i was wondering if we do get refused, do i have any redress becasue the panel seemed totally clueless about asd ?

Hi just popped in to see how things are going, sounds like theya re still ok, i know my son is happy at school but he still moans sometimes and says im not going back there, but like u i have told him this is his last chance , he does admit even if he isnt always happy its still the best he has ever had, i told him sometimes in life its time to accept things and make the best of them, i still think its a fab school, iy sounds like your son is acepting what you say too, which in itself is a major breakthrough i think , keep up the good work xx

Went to dla tribunal with my friend yesterday for DLA for her Aspie son who also has OCD, Just wondered if anyone else has any experience > The panel members a gp, a lawyer and a person who was "disbility aware" didnt know what and IEP was, and even when explained ot them , they thought the hours awarded on it were for the whole weeka nd not each day, also the lawyer didnt seem to recognise seperation anxiety even though it had been talked about several times during the tribunal , and the disability aware lady had to explain it to him. Surely although thes people are supposed to be unbiased, they cannot make informed decisions if they know nothing about the disability being discussed / Any ideas anyone ? Should they nto at least have a basic knowledge of the problems that can be associated with the dissability in question, we don't have an answer yet , but i was just wondering if anyone else had any experience, Thanks x

Thank you so much i will look at these links , and look into advocacy locally xx