Our son started his speech and language
therapy when he was 6 and in CP and this is ongoing. However, towards the end of his CE1 year (the
one after CP) we had a meeting with the head teacher as to how to plan his last
three years at primary – Cycle 3 which is CE2 and the 2 CM years. We had seen with our eldest child that there
was a lot of copying required and memorising for dictations, we felt, along
with this therapist that he would find this tiring and hard.
The head teacher was surprised, as he was
keeping up in his CE1 class – but there most of the work had been photocopied
for him and some “copying for the sake of copying” had been reduced. We asked that lessons should be given to him
in a printed format and some of the memory work – poems, dictation should be
shortened. His response was to call in
the school nurse, who decided that we had to go for a formal diagnosis with
recommendations, without which the school was not obliged to make any
adjustments.
Ho Hum!
The nurse gave me the details of the one-stop shop neuro-paediatric
centre at Lille where he could be seen by everyone all at the same time. We then went onto the waiting list, with a 4 month window to provide up to date tests on
him (or else he would be booted off!). Initially,
we had to provide – an IQ test, an up-to-date bilan d’orthophonie and a doctor’s
referral. When we got the convocation with the appointment we were also asked
for a viewpoint from his teacher.
Finally, after nearly 7 months we had
the appointment and went off to Lille for the day. He was seen first of all by the
neuro-paediatrician and then by an ortoptiste and an orthophoniste. The doctor took his family history and asked
about the problems he had. I felt very
uncomfortable doing this as he was present and I felt that the focus was on
what we perceived he couldn’t do (fairly naturally) as opposed to what he could
do. As we don’t make a fuss of what he
can’t do at home, I’m sure that many of these things were a surprise to him. Not necessarily a good one.
After the tests, we had a long wait as the
medical team consulted on the children that they had seen that day. At the end of the day we were called to see
the neuro-paediatrician again who confirmed that he was dyslexic and made some
recommendations regarding his on-going treatment. She also said that he should come back when
he was in his last year of primary in order to see his progress and to make
plans of how to best adapt for secondary education. A full report was sent out quite quickly with
the comments from the doctor and some very detailed recommendations from the
orthophoniste to help him in his daily life.
Following this, and depending on the
recommendations made a request can be made to the MDPH for the funding of
equipment or the AVS (assistant) that a child might need. It might also be necessary to put in place a
PPS (projet personalisé de scolarisation).
We have worked on a voluntary basis with the school but at the end of
CE2 are planning a meeting with them with the view to putting in place a PPS as
we feel that the recommendations are not being implemented. Apparently this too may take 6 months!! ;-)
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