ASD: on being a special-needs single parent

It was only after I had complained for 3 months, and elevated my complaint to a ‘Level 2’, that funding was made available for home tuition for my son, who has still not got a school place seven months after leaving his old school last July. I call it Unofficial Exclusion. While the old primary school maintains on its web site that it is inclusive and aims to cater for the needs of all of its pupils, including those with SEN (Special Educational Needs) it did, in fact, fail to provide appropriate one-to-one support as per the funding that it received for my son (29 hours per week) and, indeed, allowed him to leave last July without a school having been found for him to move to.

Fine – the case worker and the SENCO recommended a specialist school, aimed specifically for children on the Autism Spectrum; but when my son’s EHCP provision was not amended, the result was that all of the schools approached by the LA stated that they were “unable to meet need”. I park this at the door of the case worker, whose failure to issue a proposed amended EHCP for my son was referred to in my Level 2 Complaint response letter as “an inadvertent oversight”.

Inadvertent, my arse. I am certain, following the meeting that my mother and I had with the NE Surrey LA SEND Team, which I called a couple of weeks ago, that employees in this particular area (geographical as well as specialism) have to demonstrate an external veneer of pleasant earnestness, overlaying a dense core of stupidity, which prohibits them from questioning any of the criteria, financing or steps in the process of finding education for a child with special needs.

While I shook hands with the two Team representatives firmly enough to acquaint them with a capability to kill or at least harm them, I did not, face-to-face, find myself wanting to kill these rather pleasant and earnest morons. Even when I mentioned that, as the SEND Team, they ought to have known better than to instruct a mainstream tuition company to assist a boy with Autism Spectrum Disorder, they said that it was the management who gave them the authority, and that they had done their “due diligence” on the tutor who came to our house and wrought havoc, with the babysitter, on a fateful Monday morning.

I know that ‘due diligence’ is a term which has been bandied about since the subprime financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession, fraud, hedge-fund manipulation, insider-dealing, cutbacks, quantitative easing and austerity measures, but in Local Authorities it seems simply to mean browsing a person’s CV online just enough to ensure that there aren’t big enough unaccounted-for career gaps as to imply a prison sentence, and saying, “Okay” as they tick a box.

Thus were we treated to an hysterical gorgon without any knowledge about my son’s wiring (and that of an increasing number of children today), whose force of character had the babysitter (an ex-Learning Support Assistant to boot) taking video footage of my terrified child in some mission, on the part of the tutor and babysitter, to make some outright nonsensical statements about his behaviour, and to judge me into the bargain when I stood up for him.

And so it was, with the mention of magic phrase “due diligence” that, when I spoke to the case worker and his line manager in person at the meeting, that they washed their hands of the responsibility to complain to the tuition company, and passed that job on to me. Furthermore, it is nearly three weeks since I spoke on the telephone to an employee of the tuition company, asking to whom I should direct my complaint in correspondence, that she said she would ask their Child Protection Officer to contact me, and I have heard nothing whatsoever.

I have visited a specialist school, and I like it. Now it is Half Term and I have not heard from them. Indeed, I fear prompting anyone for information about this in case we get another, “we can’t meet need”. The case worker emailed me to say that a child-led therapeutic organisation aimed at helping to prepare children with autism to return to education after a long gap cannot take on my son because he might be volatile and they are not trained to restrain children. What. The. Fuck.

It seems that the agencies in this country whose task it is to provide a learning environment for children with special needs are dismally unfit to cater for the very children that they purport to support.

Meanwhile, as I look at the list of things I have to do: provide the independent case assessor with details of the debacle with the tutor and the babysitter; forward my spreadsheet of babysitting costs to the Children’s Rights and Quality Assurance arm of the Local Authority; telephone the training outfit with whom I undertook at the beginning of last year to study for my Level 2 certificate to be a fitness instructor and ask for a refund of some or all of the money that I paid last January, and chase the social worker to see whether he has managed to gather a contribution from the Social Care Fund towards compensating my mother and I for the childcare costs; and I just want to scream and scream and never stop.