Help Please - EHCP Our Story

Hi Dinky. We found it was certainly down to us to make the case for Monkey Boy needing an EHCP. The professionals did the minimum (with the exception of the EP) and we felt our input was needed to make sense of Monkey Boy's complexity - the like of which they had never seen. It's called an EHCP but unless you are able to say words they recognise like diabetes or asthma they have no idea how to take account of the health bit - sensory modulation difficulties or mental health conditions seemed to baffle them so we had to explain it - even to the paediatrician to be honest. 

Under question 4 where it asks for a history with strengths and weaknesses we introduced MBs background before he came to us and then described his strengths and weaknesses under the headings suggested on the form. As regards developmental milestones we related MBs difficulties under each heading back to his developmental trauma. We referred to Holly Van Gulden's ideas and Bessel Van der Kolk's work in relation to developmental delay and trauma and our parenting approach i.e. PLACE and Great Behaviour Breakdown in relation to these ideas. In the next section we were clear that MB does not have good and bad days but all days are mixed. in the section about why we were making the request we highlighted 3 points i.e. serious concerns about 

1. Lack of progression and his current trajectory.
2. Impact of MBs experience of school on his mental health and life chances i.e. poor academic attainment, poor self esteem and the impact on his chance of being able to perform a useful function in society and feel good about himself and the potential pitfalls associated with not achieving this.
3. The impact of MBs experience of school on his physical health - in his case not enough sensory input leading to severe difficulties sleeping.
We then went on to explain each of these in more detail. We acknowledged the input that had been provided and clearly stated what that had achieved in terms of outcomes and his trajectory at the time which clearly showed without additional input he would leave primary school illiterate. We defined what we meant by this i.e. unable to read a paragraph hold the meaning in mind and answer questions about a text - in other words the basics he would need for secondary school.

We were granted an EHCP but we have to say we feel the battle continues because the targets set were great but the intervention offered will never enable MB to meet the targets. When we challenge this and the fact that the EPs advice has been ignored we are just told they don't do things the way the EP suggests because they have a very successful system already. We obviously say well it's not very successful for MB and so it goes on. We have offered to fund the intervention personally and got our MP involved and the Virtual School. After all that we still don't have anything like enough but at least he gets 2 hours a week 1:1 to do a dyslexia catch up programme but with a TA not a specialist teacher. So I would recommend giving the form as much welly as possible, girding your loins for a long battle but putting some champagne on ice in the event you don't end up with quite the same battle we've had - we have spoken to lots of teacher and parents and it seems some areas of the country are much better than others. Good Luck!!!

Looking back at your original post, I see that this is an application. Ours is for a conversion from a statement, which is why it isn't so important, so my reply wasn't appropriate. Apologies for that!

For the original statement I wrote about 10 pages of A4. It was helpful that the form then had lots of sub-headings, such as eating, relationships with siblings, etc., etc. I don't know how much use it was in the statement, but has been for subsequent schools.