What can I do?

Hi, I am very new to this forum but have some huge worries about my child. I am a single parent to three children, and the younger two both have additional needs. My younger child has a diagnosis of Joint Hypermobility Syndrome, but she does not cause me any real significant concern, unlike my middle child.

My son is 11 and a half and due to transition to secondary school in September. He has undergone paediatric care since he was an infant due to delays in meeting his milestones. He was diagnosed as having Global Development Delay at around the age of 3. Shortly after this the Speech and Language therapist added Verbal Dyspraxia to his diagnosis.

Since then he has transferred to a new paediatrician and is being seen more frequently again. The new pead maintains that he still has development delay alongside some learning difficulties. He also presents as a deaf child although his hearing tests repeatedly come back as the low end of normal and so should not be creating any speech difficulties. It has been considered that he may have auditory processing disorder but I am told that Leeds has no particular test for this.

However, this is digressing. The primary school - he started in year 3 when i removed him from his last school as they refused to admit he had any additional needs after forcing me to decide to keep him a back a year in their school nursery because developmentally he was not ready for Reception. They then on the social workers insistence moved him into his correct cohort half way through year one which means he has missed an entire year of his schooling.

When he started in year 3, I was under the impression from the previous school that he was working at a national curriculum level 2 according to his end of year two sats. However, it very quickly transpired that he was infact on P scales. With lots of support from the school with very little funding he has made tremendous progress over year 3 and 4. Year 5 was different I was informed that he hadn't on paper made any progress because the progress he had made was too minimal to document - when I asked why they had not used pivots I was told that his needs did not warrant using pivots. On returning in September to start year 6 I was told that in Literacy he had regressed from a level 2 to a level 1. Having just completed his sats in year six it appears he is making level 4's and a level 5. I am sceptical how a child at a level 1 can suddenly make this jump only having the same support as previously.

The primary school have refused to ask the ed psych to assess saying that his needs are not severe enough. I have said this to his pead who is writing to the secondary school. I fear that we are going to be in, for a second transition to a new school without the right support or funding in place because his academic success has been exaggerated.

What can I do? I tried accessing a private assessment was told that they would not assess as I was already having difficulties with the state provision and a private assessment would just put my child through unnecessary trauma when the end report would likely not be of any use to me as it would likely be ignored by the professionals working with us.