An autistic boy of 16 is trapped inside his own home, depressed and cut off from the outside world. His desperate mum’s fight to get him the the education he is legally entitled to has left her ‘exhausted.’ She has contacted the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) after we revealed that tens of thousands of schoolchildren across Greater Manchester were ‘persistently absent’ from school during the 2022/23 school year. The data we accessed showed that at least 84,990 pupils of primary and secondary school range across the city region did not turn up for class in the city region. It followed the revelation of a memo sent out from a Salford education boss stating that some 13,000 children had been missing from school that city alone. Currently, this youngster, who lives in Salford, has quit a part-time job and is stuck at home with no prospect of the kind of future his friends aspire to. He plays video games and writes scripts for movies – as that is his long-term goal. His mother is battling to prevent him from descending further into depression. The boy’s mother, who has asked to remain anonymous, claims her son was enrolled on a specific college course in the city in September, but only attended twice. “What he needs is a small group setting, one-to-one support to allow him to settle into a new place,” she said. “He needs a go-to person, someone who is accessible. He twice went to that person at the college, but they weren’t available. Before I go on, let me say that I know he’s not the only student they have to deal with. I know it’s not easy.” She claims that three weeks into his course, she said she asked for a meeting with the special educational needs SEN team at the college and saw a couple of members of staff. “I asked if they had received his educational, health and care plan (EHCP) from Salford council, but they hadn’t,” she said. EHCPs are commonly made up by specialists based in councils to draw up a strategy to inform educational professionals about the specific needs of a pupil or student. “From the conversation we had in the meeting, they said if they had seen that he had social emotion and mental health needs (SEMH) that he had they would’ve said they couldn’t meet his needs, which left me wondering, ‘what next?’. Since September he has only been to class twice,” she said. “When he gets the right support around him, he can do really well. In the last year of school, they put the support around him. He has several GCSE passes. He is extremely intelligent and has the capacity to learn. “But now I’m going to have to follow the Salford city council’s complaints procedure because the council aren’t replying to anything and he is at home doing nothing.” When presented with the mother’s comments, a Salford city council spokesperson said: “As with all children and young people, our goal is to ensure everyone has access to the right provision and support they need to succeed. “In this case we have received no formal complaint and currently our case worker team is in regular and close consultation with mum of this young person and are working together to find the most appropriate form of provision.” The boy’s mother added: “I’ve been liaising with his case worker who is either non-responsive, or there are long delays getting replies from them. “My plan now is to find him a personal maths tutor. If I have to fund it myself, I’ll do it. He needs to get GCSE maths. Now, he’s looking at different courses he can do online. “He did have a part-time job, for four hours on Sundays. One of the reasons he got that job was because as part of the course he had to do a work placement for 150 hours. “But he said there’s not really much point in him carrying on with it, although it was something that he enjoyed doing. “The challenge is to help him keep the confidence he gained in the latter stages of school. His mental health had declined at school. He really struggled and I had to fight to get him out of that place. I want to keep his confidence at a reasonable level. “He already feels like he’s not part of anything. He’s watching other kids of his age doing other things. He doesn’t have many friends and he doesn’t go out socially, because he’s got no confidence.”
