Dear Ms Haste,
You will remember that we wrote to you on the 11th January regarding the forthcoming DfES Consultation ‘Suitable and Effective Home Education’ In response to our mail, you wrote back informing us that the consultation was being conducted via the Department’s consultation website and that you had added our e-mail to the list so that we would be alerted when the consultation went live. We thank you for this.
We are now making a formal request that AIM is included in this process as an important stakeholder and as an integral part of the home education community. AIM is aware that the DfES have had some pre consultation talks with some of the National Home Education Groups. It is our understanding that none of the groups who took part in these discussions were SEN specific. AIM is a National Group who supports families who have children with autism.
There are now an ever increasing number of parents who home educate their children, having found that the system is not meeting their specific and complex needs. This has been well documented by some very prominent and high profile people during the last twelve months, including the findings of the SEN Select Committee and the Voice of the Children’s Commissioner Sir Al Aynsley Green who also raised concerns. The National Autistic Society launched a National Campaign in May last year ‘make school make sense’ because of the severe problems that autistic children are facing in mainstream classrooms. These issues have got to be given careful consideration within the consultation process.
Parents who turn to Home Education as a method of educating their autistic children do so for very different reasons to parents who ‘choose’ to home educate their children. We think that it is vitally important that the voice of all stakeholders involved with home educating their children is heard. Any changes being made to the law will impact on our parents whose children were taken out of a system clearly not meeting their needs. It is important that this is recognised and acknowledged by DfES. We are not seeking to hide from the system. We are educating our children at home for very different reasons to other parents we have an important role to play in this consultation.
The outcome of this process has the possibility of impacting greatly on our families and we feel that we should be given the opportunity to put our case to you in person. We believe that there are many factors which need to be included in this consultation process that are unique to parents who home educate their autistic children.
I am attaching a copy of a document that AIM presented to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Autism three years ago detailing the reasons why many parents with autistic children are forced to home educate their children.
We hope that this report will enable you to see that need for us to be included as stakeholders in any further discussions.
May we apologise if we are sending this request to the wrong person and would ask if we could be given the name of the correct person to whom we should be making this request.
Yours sincerely
AIM
National Coordinator.
January 19, 2007 at 9:21 am |
Go there, AIM.
Would also like to add that many children who could not possibly be diagnosed as having some sort of AS problem, or indeed any other sort of SEN, do nonetheless have unique learning requirements which are often very, VERY poorly provided for in schools. eg: some children will have hearing processing problems which are virtually undetectable in a testing situation, but put these children in a class with background rustling, and they simply cannot pick out the most pertinent information coming their way.
Or a child will simply have very focussed interests that are not catered for in the school curriculum. His interests couldn’t be described as fitting into an AS category, but they are nonetheless serious and given that he is so focussed, he is unlikely to be able to concentrate on the lesson about something else in any constructive sort of a way. No point trying to force this sort of child. Doesn’t work and much to everyone’s loss. Loss of effort by school, loss of opportunity for child to be spending his time constructively learning.
If the state try a one-size fits all, they will be responsible for failing an awful lot of children, including plenty of those without demonstrable SENs.
August 17, 2007 at 4:35 am |
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