About my son with AS

I'm no longer home educating as my 18 year old son has just finished two years at college and is awaiting his A Level results. He is taking A Levels in Maths, Electronics, and Computing. Last year he got A grades at AS Level.

His time at school was a complete misery because he had difficulty in fitting in with the system and relating to other children and some teachers. He found it difficult to make friends and was constantly bullied. He was suspended from primary school twice and expelled from secondary school in Y8. After spending two years being home educated he decided to return to (a different) secondary school in Y10 to take GCSEs. He eventually dropped out after two terms due to stress and lack of suitable support. He finished Y11 without taking a single GCSE. I regret sending him to school because it totally destroyed him at the time and he has only recently recovered.

Had I known about AS then I would probably have taken my son out of school when the problems started. We never found out about AS through the education system despite having involvement with a local authority educational psychologist in Y3. She claimed he had behavioural problems but wasn't autistic. We only found out about AS by chance when we watched the documentary about Luke Jackson. After that we did lots of investigation on the internet and bought a few books about AS, then came to the conclusion that he had the condition. He was then diagnosed privately at a cost of a few hundred pounds.

When he was at secondary school in Y7, he ended up having meetings with a counsellor to help with social skills issues. The problem wasn't too bad in the early years of primary school, but the gap between my son and his classmates was widening by the time he was about 9, and became quite a serious matter by the time he was 12. Children seem to grow up faster today than 20 or 30 years ago. Even at the age of 8 or 9 they are putting toys and children's tv programmes behind them and entering premature adolescence. When my son was 9, he was intellectually several years ahead in maths, science, and IT, but was lagging behind his peers socially and when it came to recreational activities. Other lads of his own age would play football and ride bikes, but my son took no interest in these activities, and preferred to play with Lego and watch cartoons. There was a common ground of video games but that wasn't enough to keep him on a similar wavelength to his peers.

For the past 4 years my son has been a member of a local Asperger syndrome support group and they have been very helpful and given good advice on many matters. If it wasn't for the support group then he probably wouldn't be at college now. They provided us with advice on how to get into college without any GCSEs and which colleges were accepting of home educated people. It involved quite a lengthy interview and a written maths exam, but he passed and got accepted onto A Level courses.

My son's original plan was to go to university and either study electronic engineering or computing. He has now decided it would be better for him to take an apprenticeship or start a career at technician level and build up a career through work experience.