Post-16 Transitions: a Longitudinal Study of Young People with ...

“In school he had quite a lot of high profile attention from a lot of
experienced teachers but we seemed unable to help him in that it
never went beyond the moment. Whatever advice you gave him,
whatever skills you tried to teach him, he could not use them in
the situation so in the moment he would nod and yes, he
understood, but when he went out into the true testing ground
which was his relationships with other people, he couldn’t activate
or use the help we had given him.”
In fact, Matthew’s behaviour became worse, though by the time it
reached crisis point, the school decided it was too late to go
through the time-consuming statutory assessment processes.
Instead, they negotiated with Matthew’s family to place him on a
link course with a local FE College. However, this placement too
broke down and, we were told, after Matthew had been involved
with a group of other students on the fringes of some criminal
activity, he was asked to leave.
All of the young people so far in this section managed to find a
‘champion’ who offered them and their families personal support
and was in a position to marshal resources to support the young
person in school. However, not all young people were so fortunate.
Stuart is visually impaired and his mother talked of the lack of
understanding displayed by the school, even though some of the
external trappings of support were clearly in place:
“…we found the SENCO extremely unhelpful. We didn’t feel that
she was sympathetic to his needs, certainly didn’t understand his
difficulties with relationships. You know she was very quick to just
tell him what to do rather than facilitate, rather than to see how he
could be in the situation. They had an Aspergers link unit and most
of the school saw him as having Aspergers syndrome, you know
and so just ignored him. She didn’t sort of look for ways of
involving him with the unit or with people. She would give him a
list of things he ought to do and didn’t recognise that he had the
assistant sitting next to him in all the classes [and that] made him
sort of different.”
Eventually, on the advice of a specialist peripatetic teacher, Stuart
moved to a specialist college, where he became much happier.
It is dangerous to generalise too far from these cases. For
instance, in the sample of 16, special schools appear to be
experienced marginally more positively by young people and their
parents than are mainstream schools. On the other hand, the
populations of the two types of school are not directly comparable
in such a small sample. Nonetheless, some themes do seem to
emerge in terms of school experience:
Schools can and do provide high levels of support which maintain
young people in education, bring about personal, social and
academic growth and create a stable platform from which
transition can begin.
As in Carl and Matthew’s cases, support may centre around a
teacher or support assistant with the necessary time and
commitment.
Post-16 Transitions of Young People with SEN: Wave 2 53