Autism and proof of disability for school

Karen1978

I've got a 11 yer old boyou diagnosed with autism moving up to secondary school I was wondering if he would benefit from having a distability card?

Pippa_Alumni

Hi @Karen1978, and a warm welcome to the community!

When you say a disability card, was there a particular scheme you had in mind? Do let us know and we'll do our best to advise! 

atlas46

Hi @Karen1978

A very warm welcome.

There are no disabilty cards any more.

There was a green card scheme, which was ended many years ago.

If your son had a statement at his Junior school, this should be passed on to his senior school.

Hope this helps.

thara

Disability cards are no longer available. They stopped being circulated many years ago. Does he have a statement of special educational needs or not? If so it should be passed on to the school. It is worth asking. Your local council should have information on the process and mandatory paperwork.

Good luck. If you are inclined to you can send in a information packet with him on his first day of school. Or you might consider telling the teachers a bit about him beforehand. It is also a good idea to meet with the teachers before school commences with your child there and find out as many details as possible.

Ask questions. 

Geoark

Hello @Karen1978 and welcome to the community.

Hopefully the primary school would have done a lot of work already in helping your son's transition. I know with my daughter that her diagnosis came as a direct result of her primary school looking at how they could support their SEN students into secondary education and she was mentioned as one of the staff was watching her during one of these meetings during their lunch break.

My opinion differs from @thara as to who you should speak to at the new school, though certainly would not discourage any parent from speaking to teachers. However the key people I found were the SENCO, Year Mentor/Patoral Officer/Behaviour Mentor or some similar title and the Year Head. I personally found the first two to be the most important in helping my daughter to settle in.

Unlike primary schools your son will have a number of teachers and in some cases may have two or more teachers in a year for some subjects. It is the SENCOs responsibility to ensure any accomodations are made to allow your son to access the education he is entitled to. Nurturing a good relationship with the SENCO will make your life a lot easier in the future. Where there was issues with teachers we found the SENCO to be the best intermediary to sort things out. It also meant that when we did speak to the teachers we were able to concentrate on the main issues, such as how she was doing in the subject.

The year mentor was key in keeping our daughter engaged with the school, acting as a critical friend and helping to deal with some of social issues she faced, such as bullying. 

We had quite a lot of meetings with these two in the first year and a good working relationship with them helped our daughter to navigate a very difficult time. Even when I found out that with the mentor one of our daughter's favourite ways of destressing was plotting how to kill me and some of the male teachers - you probably need to know my daughter. Some were very creative, like training an army of ninja worms.

A couple of things, first despite a lot of hard work in that first year, we found we were still raising many of the same issues in the last year she was at school, so patience is important.

Second in the last year she was at the school it turned into an academy and we were asked to sign a home/school/pupil agreement. DO NOT JUST SIGN IT! if your sons school has one, read it through first. My daughter asked what would happen if she refused to sign it and was ignored by the teacher. I asked the teacher to respond as I was not prepared to sign it as it was.  A small clause in the agreement was that the school could put her into detention for up to 2 hours without informing parents. At the time she was well known to the staff and was popular with the teachers and had never been given a detention and they did not see this changing, so did not see why I had an issue with it. I pointed out that on more than one occassion she had been chased home scared that she was going to be beaten up, and this had included running across a busy road. I was not prepared to wait for over 2 hours to find out if she was on detention or if something had happened. In the end the agreement was amended so that any detention over 30 minutes the school would inform us and this was countersigned by the new Head.

Later in the year the English department decided to use that clause to force all the last year students to do an extra 10 hours a week English for two weeks, with the exception of my daughter because I insisted it was amended.

I hope things go well for your son in his new school.

Firefly123

Do you mean an autism alert card my kids have one as can't talk in stressful situations. I got them from the NAS