Had a meeting on Friday and i can say that i was pleased with how it went
He talked to me in depth about language Impairment to which he agreed T has with the reports he has read and what info i have given him, including reports from ALL previous schools.
He said what makes things difficult here is we need to tease out if there is an ASD also and then he talked to me indepth about co-morbid diagnosis' this guy really knows his stuff! He talked about other experiences he had encountered and how the mum was right all along in that case, he talked about going to talks about ASDs and about a school in our area that is mainstream but has a language impairment unit attatched to it. He also goes on online forums, he has done a lot of work with solicitors and he advises that the disability discrimination maybe another avenue to go down in our case.
He watched the dvd and asked me if CAMHS had seen it, i explained i tried to give it to CAMHS but they left it on the desk when picking up his file, so they did not have an interest in it and before that CAMHS told me T has no PDD and they would not diagnose him. EP seemed very shocked and my friend confirmed that is what they told me in their last meeting.
He is concerned that T will be getting into bother for things that are a part of his difficulty (T has been in detention for fighting at school last week) he said not having a diagnosis should not be hindering the help he needs. I told him that the ESW has told me blatantly that 'T has no diagnosis' therefore he does not qualify as special needs and again he seemed shocked by the ignorance of Ts needs.
He said it must have cost me a few bob with having to pay for reports and for help, i said yes but i know my son and i know there is something amiss, for him to have a life he needs help and thats why i was in a meeting with him.
He will now write a report about his opinion on Ts difficulties and he said to me 'it must be nice to have someone on ur side because it seems a lot of people are not seeing his pragmatic and semantic learning difficulties' ur telling me!!! He was a welcoming man and really knew his stuff!
He is part of the LA but he explained he is quite independent in his work and knowledge in the field of learning difficulties, hence why he is an EP and a devoted one at that! A shame more EPs cant be like him eh?!
He is going to refer T to the local autism outreach service himself and again he was shocked that i had requested school do this but to no avail, he will now be passing our case to the EP for our area of where we live and she will now be the EP involved. He said she is nice and works on the same level as him but he cant do our case as he covers a different part of our town.
He is contacting the ESW as he said a CAF needs to happening, it stands for Common Assessment Framework - Every Child Matters. So these meetings that have been happening at school are not adequate enough for the needs of T, it doesnt suprise me because its been a long process of them meetings doing absolutely nothing in regards to T needs!!
SW has left a message saying he is coming to see me on Thursday morn with a Senior Practitioner, anybody ever had a practitioner involved with their children? Still dont know much about what to expect and i have done a bit of reading on it.
Time will tell how things will pan out from all this but surely they cant be ignorant for much longer?!
10/3/2008, 7:10 am
