Archives for "Integration"
Do I Have to be a Squeaky Wheel?
My daughter’s primary school drew my attention to a meeting that the local authority was having. It was inviting parents and carers of children with dyslexia and other learning issues. It said “Do you have a child with Dyslexia and / or Developmental Co-ordination Disorder [DCD] or another specific learning difficulty i.e. Dyscalculia or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)? We want to hear your views on the provision made for your child and how we can improve our support.” It then went on to list the various venues within the authority.
It was very short notice, less than a week. However I was able to go along with four other parents from my daughter’s primary school. A large room was set out with chairs and cups of tea or coffee. However there can have only been a handful of parents there. Most of these parents knew of the meeting through a Private dyslexia school.
The meeting went on to describe how the authority had provided provision and how it was going to change. Most provision needs to be provided in the child’s local school with only very extreme cases being taught in specialist schools. This seems to make sense, since most children and parents want their child to be in mainstream school. However every parent at the meeting felt frustrated by the lack of understanding teachers seem to have about the condition. Some teachers of course are fantastic but it does seem to be very hit and miss. There is hardly any training at teacher training college and most teachers are meant to learn on the job. The trouble with this approach is that it seems to take too long to trickle-down to the individual teachers in the classroom. As much as the specialists say that there should be no copying off the board in lessons or lots of dictation, it continues to happen every day in classrooms up and down the country. These are things that dyslexic pupils find almost impossible. No matter how many times you tell a teacher this they do not seem to understand: they make comments like, ”I moved your daughter to the front so she can see, ” or “How did you spell this wrong? it was on the board.”
At the end of the meeting as we all stood around chatting we came to the conclusion that as a parent you tend to know what is best for your child and that it is up to you to get it. The best way to do this is to keep good channels of communication with your child’s school and to keep nagging! As an ex-boss said to me, “it’s the squeaky wheel that gets oiled.”
ABA Sessions paid for and paying off.
Recently I took the little autistic boy that I work with to his office based ABA session. He was so excited to get there that he was up the stairs before I had worked out how to close the door. He ran into the room and immediately started playing with toys that were on the floor. The session was very structured and he worked very hard. One of the activities he found particularly hard was placing objects on, in, or beside other objects. For example putting the brick in the box or putting the brick on the bridge. I was surprised how hard he found it. These sorts of instructions are given all day at school or nursery. “Can you put your books away and line up at the door” would have been an instruction I would have regularly given as a teacher. The ABA sessions are fantastic at preparing him for integration into mainstream school. Every activity is broken down to tiny sections for him to practice and achieve.
One of his ABA tutors regularly goes into his nursery to work with him with other children. This is helping his social skills and encouraging him to use his peers as role models. The nursery had been worried that the sessions would be too structured however they have said that everybody is benefiting from having a tutor in nursery. Although his tutor works with him, helping him with the activities and to focus and sit still at story time the other children also benefit from having an extra adult at nursery. One of the nursery nurses said, ”Oh, ABA is just playing!”
I have been very impressed with the progress he has made doing the ABA program. He’s working with autism partnership which happens to have to an office not far from where he lives. And I feel very privileged to see the incredible progress he has made. For example when I first met him he would not use both hands to build or do puzzles. Also he would not look at what he was doing. He liked to use his peripheral vision. Yet now he can build complicated 3-D puzzles including a build my pickup truck puzzle, for this he needs to use two hands and to look very carefully.
It has been huge battle for his parents to get him on an ABA program. For nearly a year they had to fund it themselves and had to actually deliver the programme themselves for much of the time. This meant one parent had to give up work and their other children miss out on many activities. However just before Christmas they won their tribunal and their local education authority is now funding the ABA program. There is always the worry that the education authority will change its mind and withdraw the funding. It does seem very short-sighted and that hopefully when he has finished the program he will be able to access mainstream education with limited support. Surely in the long run this is cheaper than putting children like him in a special school.
The autism partnership website is a very good one and an explains things clearly and concisely