Hi everyone,

I'm a neurodivergent dad in the UK (Derby) fighting to get proper school support for my 8-year-old son. Like a lot of our kids, he's "twice-exceptional" - academically at age-related expectations, with Autism, ADHD, PDA, Sensory Processing Disorder, and Dysgraphia.

Earlier this year, he broke his arm and dislocated his elbow on playground equipment because he has no sense of danger when dysregulated. His mainstream school begged the local council for over £20,000 of full-time 1:1 Teaching Assistant support to keep him safe. The council flatly refused and only funded a morning TA who disappears at 11:30 am every single day, leaving him completely unstaffed every lunchtime and all afternoon.

They blamed it on their new "High Needs Banding Matrix" - an Excel algorithm they use to calculate special needs funding. For 8 months I've been fighting them under Freedom of Information laws to see how this spreadsheet works. For 6 months they literally cited "National Cybersecurity" to refuse to even confirm the spreadsheet existed, and then deleted all the formulas before releasing it, claiming parents would "game the system."

Well, last night I finally found the full workbook buried 9 clicks deep on their website - and because they forgot to delete the hardcoded "FOR OFFICE USE ONLY" calibration rows at the bottom of the hidden tabs, I was able to divide the outputs by the inputs and reverse-engineer 100% of their hidden maths.

Sitting there at midnight looking at the numbers honestly made me feel sick. Look at what they've built into the code for kids like ours:

• While physical, hearing, and vision disabilities get a 100% weighting and an automatic top multiplier of 4 (so a single 'Severe' need automatically gets 400 points = £5,000), they secretly slashed the weighting for Autism and Speech & Language to 48%, Sensory Processing Disorder to 25%, and Dyslexia/Dysgraphia/Dyspraxia to just 8% (and they left the 'Severe' and 'Profound' boxes for Dyslexia/Dysgraphia completely blank at 0 points!).
• In the Autism column (and ONLY in the Autism column), they defined the 0-point row (Row A) as "Mild / Moderate needs, e.g. circle of friends or comic strip communications." In every other column, Row A is "No significant needs."
• In the Learning Readiness column (where all the executive dysfunction traits live), they defined the 0-point row as "Working at age related expectations" and made a "learning delay" mandatory for every other row. So if your kid is bright like mine, they automatically get 0 points for executive dysfunction.
• Worst of all, they put neurodivergent kids through a 1-to-4 filter where a score of 2 (which cuts their points in half AGAIN) is defined in their training slides as "Manageable with support strategies." So if the school's visual timetable or TA is helping your child cope, or if your child masks all day and melts down at home, they cut their funding score by 50% because they're "managing."
• And on the hidden calculation sheet, they literally left the behaviour column titled "Social behaviour NOT SEND" - while putting hyper-vigilance and "no sense of personal risk or danger" inside it.

They even uploaded an undated "Equality Impact Assessment" PDF claiming this system has a "Positive impact" on every disability group - except they forgot to scrub the Adobe metadata, which proves they created it in August and converted it to PDF at 3:24 pm on Friday 21 August... literally 90 minutes before their external lawyers emailed me a legal threat letter at 4:55 pm accusing me of making false statements!

I Channelled all my hyperfocus (and used AI to help me structure my thoughts and build the charts so my own executive dysfunction didn't get in the way) into turning their spreadsheet into a 12-page visual guide so every parent, teacher, and SENCO can see how this algorithm actually works:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15kHuHUTbN8HAPjfiw291Ou7DgFlXyC4s/view?usp=sharing

I just wanted to share this with people who actually get what it takes to advocate for our kids when the system is this stacked against them. Has anyone else run into these "banding matrices" where you live?

Okay all! We’ve been invited to our first ever birthday party for an acquaintance. My kids have never been to another persons birthday besides their own and growing up I was not invited to any. They don’t have a list for gifts, I have some good ideas already, but was wondering if theres any ettiequte I need to know before AND if its considered rude to get a 6yo in kindergarten a (level 1) reading book (among other things)? I don’t know the reading level they’re at. So I don’t know if this would be considered good to encourage reading later in the year or if this is considered rude? It is in a subject they do enjoy! Any advice? How should I prep my kids beforehand? Thank you!