Twice a year an I.E.P. is organised at my sons school to discuss his progress and what is required to carry on the good work of educating him. Individual Education Programme is what I think it means if my memory serves. They take place at the beginning  of the school year and at the end, I am invited to attend the one at the end of the school year. In the first three years everyone involved in his education attended. Speech and language therapist,  occupational therapist,  child psychologist,  class teacher,  learning assistant, support for learning teacher and the head teacher. But since we fell into a recession it seems the out of school professionals are phoning it in. Which whilst I am a little concerned,  I am not so worried because he is progressing very well, amazingly so in fact.

They tell me his reading is ahead of the rest of the class although his maths skills are not quite up to scratch. The one thing that I find most frustrating though is his writing. It truly is like a spider has walked through some wet ink then across a page. Having raised my concerns about his writing at the I.E.P. meetings on several occasions and then noting his improvement has been slow.  I have a feeling they just don't have the time to work with him one to one on his writing skills and as such are happy that he uses a typewriting type of computer or 'Alphasmart', to complete his homework with. He can spell very well and he can also read what he has written, but sadly no one else can read what he has written. He also writes very quickly perhaps trying to keep up with his thoughts. When he does slow down and concentrates he can produce something very illegible and also neat. He once asked me if he could write a letter to a comic because he wanted to see if they would publish it. So having prepared what he wanted to say he set about writing it. I had to explain that it needed to be neat or no one would understand it. Sure enough he wrote a very good letter and very neatly written. He obviously understood the importance of writing neatly. It made me think that perhaps if we could some how get him to understand that he is writing for some one else and not just himself, it might make a difference, but to no avail.

So again I had to turn to Kate the autistic guru who had already helped me improve his diet. With the charity she worked for, the autistic children she works with are on a list,  and every time she attends to one and completes a task with them,  the child returns to the end of the list and so on. She had contacted me to let me know that my son was getting close to the top of the list again,  and was there anything I  wanted her to help with.