Emailed my public school

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Emailed my public school to see if they had a record of an aptitude/IQ test I took in the early 70s. I got a very considerate response but unfortunately no such record is available. They have agreed to send my file which apparently acknowledges I was being bullied but the solution offered at the time was that "attack is the best form of defence" . It does not mention autism but as the person says the word was virtually unknown in schools at the time. What it does mention is difficulties with mathematical drawing and writing.

Gosh you've had better luck than I had. I too e-mailed both my primary and my secondary school, hoping to find that my records would be available. The secondary school never got back to me. The primary school responded but said that my records would have all been "destroyed" by now -- I was at the school from about 1966 to 1973. And they said there was nothing to access.

I am sorry to hear you didn't have better luck.

Thanks firemonkey; it's okay, just a reminder I'm so ancient now, lol!

I'm glad they still have yours.

Same with me some years ago when I visted my HS to get some kind of record or other. I got it resolved some other way, but I am also class of '73 (which is so ancient that even if they still did have my records they would need the Rosetta Stone to translate them into modern language from the heiroglyphics that they were originally written in. Lol!

I was told that schools generally destroy records around 5 years after graduation. Surprised some people are still able to get records decades later.

I guess they'd run out of space eventually.

Now digital records are so much easier to keep and don't gather dust in some fusty basement.

I expect mine would be in the school museum by now if they had anything of interest...

Just think how a school would feel if they had e.g J.K. Rowling as a student there and they destroyed her records not realizing she would one day become famous and her records would be of interest...

Now that everything is in the computer now, I wonder if they don't destroy them anymore.

I would imagine it's all very different now in the digital age, where they could now probably just store everyone's digital records and just keep storing it all indefinitely, since it will only be hard drive space instead of physical file-folder space.

Got the information today. It was very scant, mostly consisting of correspondence from my father to my prep school headmaster and from my prep school headmaster to my public school headmaster.
My prep school headmaster said I was not very well co -ordinated and not particularly clever. The latter assessment is not that surprising given that I was academically under performing due to probable learning difficulties; for which there was no help at the time. What I do know is that I often score in the late 120s to mid 130s on online tests (suggesting within the 97-98 percentile), and that various pdocs have regarded me as highly/very intelligent.

I did notice that for all my prep school headmaster's comment on my relative lack of intelligence he chose to write that my "Maths was week" . Obviously his spelling was weak!

There was some mention of bullying with, apart from what I wrote in my original post, my public school house master also saying I was the sort to invite bullying.

[quote="firemonkey"]
I did notice that for all my prep school headmaster's comment on my relative lack of intelligence he chose to write that my "Maths was week" . Obviously his spelling was weak!

That is very amusing! Writing and word games are among my special interests so I always aim to be as accurate as possible/

I also had a hard time of it at school. But there were several apologies from now mature old boys 35 years after leaving school, (both in person and online) when I attended a reunion for the first time and was also newly diagnosed Asperger.

The nearest my prep school headmaster got to recognising a problem was to say that I had difficulty with writing and mathematical drawing and wasn’t very well coordinated(nowadays a big red flag for dyspraxia) . My public school records mention disorganised and untidy (another big red flag). I think a lot of bright children/teenagers of my generation with what would now be recognised as aspergers,dyspraxia, non verbal learning disorder etc were badly let down by the system.

Thank goodness things are at least somewhat better for such children/adolescents nowadays.

Motor co-ordination was always the chief issue for me. I still can't ride a bicycle or drive a manual car.

It has improved a bit with the help of technology. I can only write with my left hand, but I can only operate my mouse with the right!

Yes, it was very difficult growing up as "different" in a small town in the mid 1970's. Even the medical experts (psychiatrists etc) in the nearest city had certainly never heard of Aspergers and I only heard of it in 2008!