It’s no secret within our community of parent carers of PDAers that the question of school is a really gnarly and difficult one.
Amongst my friends, there seems to be a pattern of ‘we’re fine in primary school at the moment!’
…which then inevitably leads on to ‘ok, we need an EHCP and reasonable adjustments now…’
…which then sadly seems to lead on to ‘this just isn’t working in mainstream’.
Then come the big questions:
Specialist provision?
And if so, which one can meet our kids’ unique set of needs? Truly PDA-friendly settings are few and far between. And they require your PDAer to magically overcome their anxiety, mistrust and trauma which has likely built up along the way.
Alternative provision?
Learning in a non-school environment more equipped to cater for different needs? This can look like mentors visiting the house, or your child visiting a forest school, or any number of alternatives. But there is usually a LA requirement that the end goal is to get your child back in to school.
EOTAS? (That’s Education Other Than at School for the uninitiated) which is notoriously difficult to secure, and also requires your child to be willing and able to participate in activities, which then have to be evidenced to the LA as not only meeting the goals of their EHCP but at the same time the LA have to agree to fund said activities.
Wow that was a long sentence. But you get the drift.
And then there’s EHE – Elective Home Education, to give it the correct and official term.
Which is when, usually battered and broken from some or all of the above, parents who are lucky enough to be able to stay at home and see no other alternative but to take over the education of their child. This is when many traumatised PDAers and their worn-out parents are able to find some respite from the relentless devil-on-the-shoulder of formal education, via de-schooling, unschooling and interest-based learning.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Except that’s not necessarily the case.
EOTAS and EHE have their own special challenges if your PDAer sees home as a place for rest and play, perhaps can’t leave the house, perhaps wants the company of other children but doesn’t feel able to attend group activities, and perhaps like JJ has the constant feeling that something is missing from his life but struggles to find out what it actually IS that he wants to do.
And I’ve not even mentioned the complexities of managing this if you have more than one child…
Now this, my friends, is the very definition of a rock and a hard place.
And if mainstream *is* working for you at the moment, then please don’t read this as a miserable prediction that it won’t continue to.
All settings and children are different.
PDAers are not one homogeneous group, and neither are schools.
This is just my own personal experience of the difficulties which our children commonly face, and the difficult decisions we as parents have to make.
A Boy Less Ordinary 