Special educational needs: a guide for parents and carers of children with autistic spectrum disorders Author: Carolyn Waterhouse and the NAS Advocacy for Education team ISBN: 978 1 90572 203 7 Code: NAS 664 £3.00 excl. vat £3.00 incl. vat

This very helpful guide explains the law relating to special educational needs, additional supports, who provides them and how to access them. It includes useful timescales and pointers and manages to pack a huge amount of very helpful and accessible technical information into just a few pages.

Published by The National Autistic Society, 2006, 34pp, A4, pbk

Review

Carolyn Waterhouse and the NAS Advocacy Team have been able to combine clarity and reasonable brevity in this guide to the law relating to special educational needs. Although no amount of skilful writing and editing could ever turn educational legislation into a good read, the guide manages to remain readable and accessible even when describing some of the intricacies of the law.

Parents are likely to appreciate the tips and specimen letters that are a feature of the guide and Local Authorities and schools have nothing to fear from its even handed style and content.

The section on IEPs is the only part of the guide where more detail might have been helpful. Although the text does actually state that pupils with special needs will normally have an IEP, parents may well get the impression that this is a statutory requirement. In fact, schools only have to pay due regard to this aspect of the Code of Practice, and group learning plans or interventions recorded as part of class lesson plans are now identified by the DfES are alternatives to IEPS.

Philip Whitaker
Northamptonshire Autism Adviser