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John, what kind of things in the classroom
either helped or hindered his learning?
Well, taking the story on from the previous two questions,
by this time my son was eight and a half to nine years old,
he'd been out of school for quite a while
and it was... he was ready and we were ready
to find a school for him.
So we began this process and we took quite a time about it.
We thought about it quite carefully.
We thought about what things he would need
and what kind of school we felt would be appropriate for him.
And in time we found another primary school in Canterbury
which we felt was appropriate for my son.
The headteacher and the teachers
appeared to be interested in us and in my son
and they didn't appear to be at all fazed
by the fact that he had some difficulties.
The SENCO seemed like a good person
and she seemed like a person who would be willing to take on...
to be a problem-solver, to take on a problem and work with it,
not someone who wanted to avoid problems
or seemed to have her own predisposed ideas
about what the problem was or whatever.
So she was someone that we felt we could work with as well
and we could talk to,
and that was very reassuring.
In working with the school SENCO,
as I said, she wasn't a person with an enormous amount of experience
but she was a good problem-solver
and she arranged for a psychological assessment with us,
with a psychologist,
in order to get a statement for my son.
And the result of that was that we had a classroom assistant allocated,
classroom assistant time allocated for my son,
and this enabled him to do some...
to be withdrawn for some special sessions
where they could work on mind maps,
on his oral presentation instead of written presentation,
on short-term memory difficulties
that he had at that particular time.
And I could feel his confidence building a bit while he was here
because it was at quite a low ebb in some ways
before he came to this school.
Also his class teacher...
He struck up a good relationship with his class teacher.
His class teacher had a sense of humour
and again he wasn't fazed by some of the difficulties that my son was having
and he didn't make superficial judgments or assumptions
about his abilities in any particular area.
And in fact he talked to me quite a lot
about some of the things that my son was coming up with orally
which showed that he was actually far ahead orally
than he was in terms of writing.
So there's still a piece of the puzzle missing
from my son's puzzle of the difficulties he was having,
and we'll come to that a bit later on.
But we had established at this point, and he had had a statement,
so he was getting the extra support that he needed.
So the time came for him to transfer from primary to secondary school.
At this point he had had special sessions with the classroom assistant,
he'd been withdrawn for various things,
and he wasn't unhappy in any way at all,
he was in fact very happy, really, at that particular time with his education.
He felt comfortable, his confidence had been growing quite a lot.
But we had to then kind of decide what to do
in transfer from primary to secondary.
Now, he said to me at that time...
We considered various options.
One of the options was a school in Canterbury
with a special unit for dyslexic pupils.
Another option was a special school, not far away,
which was a school designated for young people with dyslexic problems.
We thought about this.
We went to the school where they had a special unit
and I took my son with me.
He wasn't particularly impressed by it,
I was very unimpressed by the head of this unit,
who didn't appear to be at all interested
in the whole idea of dyslexia,
didn't appear to want to discuss it with me at all
and seemed, well, to put it bluntly,
not very outgoing and not very forthright
and just didn't fill me with much confidence, I have to say.
We went to the special school,
which was, I must say, a different kettle of fish
in terms of people being interested again
and talking to them and them giving us confidence.
But ultimately I wanted my son to have the decision,
or at least to have a big say in the decision about where he would go,
and he said to me at that time, very strongly,
"Dad, I would like to go to a school
where I'm not different from the others,
where I don't have to go off for special sessions
and don't have a classroom assistant sitting next to me half the time."
"You know, it makes me feel different."
"I want to go somewhere where all the others have a similar problem,
where I'm the same as the others
and I don't feel as if I'm kind of on the edge."
He didn't quite use those words
but that's what he said to me, not in so many words.
So we were faced with making choices,
and of course choices are always a bit limited,
you know, you are limited to what there is around you.
And so that was what we felt at that particular time,
but we were ready to make a choice.