DD1, (10) ASD and Dyslexic, academic level of a 6 year old. Developmentally a bit behind her peers, but not excessively so. Not very good socially, she gets by, but can get quite lonely at school at times. She goes to a mainstream primary, and is currently in year 5
We've just had her proposed statement through (yay), and it stated which school the LEA thought was appropriate for her to go at secondary. It's a specialised ASD school. After A LOT of deliberating and making a decision then changing our minds, they changing them again, both DH and I decided before she actually got awarded the statement that we wanted her to go to this specialised ASD school. We decided that if she didn't get a statement that we would give some serious thought to homeschooling her, as we felt that mainstream secondary would just be awful for her. So we're obviously delighted that the LEA have decided she should go to this school. We sent off the form for our preferred school so they could put it in the finalised statement. The form had to be back before 5ht July, so we posted it last week.
Today when DH picked the kids up from school the SENCO (who has been very good throughout dd's school life) pulled him aside for a chat. She said that she hoped we didn't mind but she had to give us her opinion on the school we'd chosen for dd1. She said that she didn't feel the special school we'd picked would be best for dd1, that she would be "of a higher level" than the rest of the kids there. She thought she would be better off in a certain mainstream secondary with a special ASD unit (that has a fucking awful reputation and we vetoed immediately) or a certain single sex secondary (that we had originally said we had a preference for, but is actually highly academic so would be no good really). She said she felt that sending dd1 to a special school would almost "stigmatise" her and she felt she would be better in mainstream.
I'm once again totally confused. Are we doing the wrong thing sending her to special school? We honestly feel like in mainstream she will just get lost in the system, bullied because she's so different, possibly get in with the wrong crowd because she has low self esteem. At least in a special school all the other kids have the same type of difficulties as dd1. She needs one to one for pretty much all her schoolwork, (which she is getting some of in primary atm, but not to the level she needs) she can't write a full sentence because she struggles to spell words and apart from capital letters and full stops has no recognition of grammar at all. We thought we'd made the right decision, but now I'm back to worrying and wondering what to do for the best.
Any advice, experiences or opinions would be great.
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Are we making the right decision to send her to special school?
7 replies
ReginaPhilangie · 11/07/2013 17:25
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