Thanks Sanne, I have modified my original post as I think it was too long and my questions not clear enough.

I am really very happy with the level of OT advice and intervention we have around handwriting. The children see both a child specialist OT, who is accustomed to doing standardized handwriting assessments for schools etc, and an adult hand specialist (who mostly deals with adults recovering from injury and surgery and is expert at relearning handwriting, making devices, etc). The child specialist had never seen a child with hands like my middle daughters develop handwriting to the level that we managed with years of intervention with the adult specialist. We used custom made splints, a range of grips, etc. complex exercises... Her progress was exceptional, and yet two weeks after we moved her to full time typing at 10 years old her teacher came to me near tears and told me all the ways my daughter's life had changed (for the good) since moving to a laptop... And now, almost 3 years later, we may as well never have done all that therapy at all because her handwriting has regressed so badly.

I feel completely qualified to work on actual handwriting, to the extent we choose to pursue it. And well supported by my local professionals with regard to handwriting. On the other hand it's much harder getting good local guidance on current AT options, or current research about learning/memory and handwriting vs whatever-you-have-automaticity-in.

Edited to add: Child OT thinks handwriting is an anachronistic skill completely irrelevant to modern life and no child should be made to handwrite unless they want to. Hand specialist OT thinks handwriting is a critical neuro-motor skill and should be protected/fostered. School makes all the right noises about understanding/supporting our kids but no effort to find supports and randomly we get comments comments like how they saw neat handwriting that one time "so they know the child could if they felt like it", and work still gets comments about neatness, presentation etc...

Essentially I need to forge my own beliefs about what is best here and then make it work before considering whether our child should re-enter the school system, and if so, send her back with a fully functional output system/s that school must agree continuing to before we proceed. Whether she goes back into school is not only about this issue.

Last edited by MumOfThree; 07/09/19 02:09 AM.