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The first thing you need to ask for is an Assessment of Needs - this is where a SW will formally assess your family's needs and there are set timescales that they have to do this in. Sadly many adopters find that SW have less knowledge than them and are not keen on being told what the family want/need, so you need to be careful how you approach this - I hope you are lucky and have a knowledgeable, competent SW. Whereabouts in the UK are you? What is available and the detail of the processes does vary between the four countries that make up the UK.

Thanks for that. Yes, suspect support varies across the UK and yes it would be great if we were allocated a' clued in' social worker - but we're not at that stage yet - think they must be a bit stretched in terms of resources in the East Midlands!

When we made our request, we had an assessment of needs done in August and the therapy was started in January. We would say it will depend on what therapy is available in your area and how busy they are. It was suggested that the period between the request for support and the assessment of needs we kept a diary detailing all the issues and any problems times, this meant we could hand this over to support the assessment of needs and again when we planned the therapy.

Might also be worth asking for EP assessment and speech and language assessment. That can often throw up stuff that may not be obvious

And an autisme assessment, all the things you describe are symptomes of autisme. As your son appears to have an avarage intellect he can easily be over looked, 'he can't have autisme, he is sort of social' etc, etc.

You can ask for a multi disciplinary assessment to cover as much as possible and keep an open mind

Thank you to everyone for the helpful info. Hopefully we will at least get an assessment of needs done fairly soon and now I've some ideas about the direction this should hopefully take as well as a rough idea of time scales.

Thanks Safia. I didn't know you could ask for a multi-disciplinary assessment.

About 6 years and then another 3 years while the local authorities and other professionals argued over who was paying for what. In the last 4 years we’ve done better for getting help. It took 9mth to get a sw assessment but then only 3 months for the ASF money and into treatment

It's taken us about 7 months to get an assessment of need and then for our LA and the provider to complete the paperwork between them. We are still waiting for an appointment for the provider to do an assessment of our son, and will then need to wait for an application to the ASF for the actual treatment to go through - I'm only hoping this part will be significantly faster. We knew what we were asking the PASW for when we had the assessment of needs. This is the 2nd time we've applied to the ASF and in our experience you need to know what therapy/assessment you are asking for, and have identified who is going to supply this. This is partly because we adopted out of county I think, so PAS not familiar with local provider. This has pros and cons as there was no attempt to funnel us in a certain direction, but nor was there any advice as to what we should ask for. I like the idea above of asking for a multidisciplinary assessment, we found it very hard to be sure we were really asking for the right thing, or at least, the best thing. We knew what we were asking for this time as we'd been seen by CAMHS and referred to a unit they have which is for looked after and adopted children. (As an aside, I'd be interested to find out how referrals/funding worked before the ASF...) The first time we'd done a course on sensory processing, ticked almost every box on a basic checklist of signs to watch out for, and so went for that. We'd also learned somewhere that therapy should run in the order body/sensory then talking therapies (it was put much better than this). Certainly our son is nowhere near ready for talking therapy, still finds this far too difficult and needs therapy involving movement/play/art.

Wow Pear Tree that's far too long to wait! Glad to hear things have improved in the last four years! Scafell, that's interesting what you mentioned about the sensory processing stuff being a better starting point - I don't think my son would be ready for talking therapies either. I will have a look around at the providers in our area and thanks to info. from people on here have some idea of the type of assessments we need.

Only a quick response - will answer the original ques re timings when have more time - but to back up what Scafell said, have a look at 'Beacon House' resources (which are brilliant!) - they talk about a 'bottom up' approach which has to start with sensory before anything else can be tackled. xxxx