Lucy Lloyd-Scott is the proud mother of two gorgeous children, the eldest of which has Down’s Syndrome. She talks openly and very helpfully about how his first term in mainstream Reception is going so far…
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Our son, who has Down’s Syndrome, has almost completed his first term in Reception at mainstream primary school. On balance it has been a positive start but not without some challenges to overcome along the way….
We took the decision to defer his place for a year, which in hindsight was the best thing we could have done. That extra year at nursery enabled him to become more confident at walking (he only walked on his fourth birthday), to develop his communication skills so that he could be more easily understood and to work on better bladder control. The deferment has really helped to put him on more of an even footing with his peers and even his smaller stature has gone unnoticed when compared to other children in his class who are only just four.
The classroom support for our son has been the biggest challenge so far.
His EHC plan is vague in that it doesn’t mention prescribed hours of support, but does require him to receive “regular support throughout the day”. This hasn’t particularly worried us because the last thing we want is ‘Velcro care’ (i.e. an adult stuck to him all day every day). Initially he had two alternating staff members supporting him, but this has fluctuated. The Support Assistants in the Reception area are doing their best, but we do worry that he isn’t getting the personal attention he needs. We raised this with the school and while they have been reassuring, positive and helpful about our son and meeting his support needs, they have struggled to recruit and retain enough Support Assistants. Bizarrely the government insists that our borough (in zone 3) is ‘outer London’, making Support Assistant salaries (which are already low paid) less attractive than in neighbouring boroughs.
His teacher is very enthusiastic, but new and inexperienced. Our son worships him, but his teacher struggles to command the Support Assistants in the area and he often ends up taking our son to the toilet or trying to supervise his eating at lunch. It’s hard to tell how much time he is able to dedicate to teaching our son and the other 29 children in the class. This hasn’t gone unnoticed though and senior staff members are working to support him to take a more managerial approach.
We have agreed a home/school communication book, but at the moment this just tells us what our son has eaten (or not). We know we now need to work with the school to move beyond this ‘proof of concept’ and start requesting and providing more detailed feedback.
We haven’t had much information about what he is doing or how he is getting on other than from the words, songs or numbers he repeats at home. Parents’ evening seemed to focus on how the school were supporting him rather than what he has learned. Perhaps we are expecting too much in terms of communication? He is our first child so we don’t have much to compare our experience with and it is certainly a culture shock going from the communication overload at nursery (how many trips to the toilet and what they consisted of) to the slight communication void of school… This week we did receive an overview of the letters and phrases they are working on so it feels as if communication is improving. We are also attending a drop-in session at the school later this month, to see some of his work, which we hope will enlighten us further.
So school has been slightly hit and miss, but then it was probably always going to be like this as things settle down. Crucially, our son seems happy and has made lots of friends. While there are elements of his school life which aren’t working as well as they could be, we see this as a ‘work in progress’.
Building a good relationship with the SENCO/Inclusion Manager has been really important and approaching each issue as something to be jointly solved rather than a war to be waged has been the best approach.
We are keeping a close eye on how our son develops but feel hopeful and positive about his primary school experience. As we left a recent meeting with the school, the Head (who impressed us by being keen to attend) said that by year five or six, she wanted our son to be the same as his peers; requiring limited or no support but getting the most out of his primary school experience – now that’s the sort of challenge we want!
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You can also read about how our first term in mainstream Reception is going with our boy with Down’s Syndrome. Please also check out our other posts related to Down’s Syndrome.
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