Pearls of SENCo wisdom

Last week I had a meeting at G's school with his teacher and the Special Educational Needs Coordinator. Well, I say the SENCo - actually she is also the Deputy Head of the primary school that G attends and she is ALWAYS too busy to talk to parents. She bustled in and out of the room - making like a headless chicken doing very very busy and important things.

G is not statemented. He has Aspergers Syndrome and is at the top end of the spectrum. But he does have Aspergers Syndrome. He's on School Action Plus. Needless to say, the SENCo has been too busy this half term to actually have an IEP meeting with us. So G has soldiered on - mostly fine - but his needs pretty much ignored.

So I'd called the meeting to discuss which areas of G's daily school life could be slightly tweaked to prevent him from coming home totally overloaded by his efforts at school.

The teacher is ok - pretty experienced but, also pretty unaware of how AS can affect children like G who mostly manage to hold themselves together at school. Children like G who are academically very bright.

We chatted about how G HATES sports and PE at school. Most Tuesdays G tells me that he's too unwell to go to school. It's sometimes a real struggle to get him there. There's an external company who do the PE - young Sports jocks who mostly seem to dislike any child that finds it hard to join in with something that they don't fully understand the rules of and everyone's running around and shouting and making too much noise and it's all really unpredictable and aaaagggghhhh find it necessary to either shout at G or let him sit crying on the sidelines. Phew. Poor kid. The only funny thing is that the main shouty jock dude has a name that sounds like something that rhymes with beenis....! Not really that funny but G struggles to find the silver lining in "PE Hell", as he calls it.

I asked whether there might be someone to support G and anyone else that finds PE hard - someone to HELP THEM TO JOIN IN not to sit it out feeling like failures. 

We never really got to the punch line because in bustled the SENCo to give me her undivided for 3 minutes! I'm going to cut to the chase here - we discussed other stuff but we got to talking about the secondary school that we're applying for for next September. And here's what the SENCO!!!! said:

"I'm going to give you some advice, Mrs Hughes (whoop whoop let me take note of these pearls of wisdom, thought I). If I were you (hushed tones used here, bit of a drum roll...) I wouldn't mention that G has Aspergers on his application form - it would label him, lump him in with those children with actual Special Needs...."(Did I actually just hear that correctly, thought I).

Oh.

My.

God. 

I've suspected that they thought I was a hysterical, trendy-label-demanding mum who couldn't leave her child alone. And they, clearly, do! I said this to her:

"G has AS. He IS labelled with that by his very neurological makeup. We never want this to be an excuse but it IS a very real reason why he finds some things hard. What we want for him is understanding. Acceptance. Recognition of his great skills. Not to be treated totally differently but supported to achieve the same things he'd achieve if he had a normally wired brain."

What I actually should have said is unprintable.