Who will assess a child or young person’s additional support needs?
Assessment is an ongoing process of gathering, structuring and making sense of information about a child or young person and their circumstances. Currently, assessment involves discussion with a wide range of professionals, in partnership with parents, depending on the needs of the child or young person. This practice will continue.
Can parents now ask educational psychologists to test their children for dyslexia?
This is a good question, but the answer isn’t a simple one.
The Act does give parents (and young people) the right to ask for assessments, and the circumstances where this applies are explained in detail in the Code of Practice. Parents in Edinburgh have always been able to ask educational psychologists (and other services) to be involved with their children and this will continue.
It is important that parents, school and the educational psychologist work together and for this reason, we do ask parents to discuss their concerns with the school in the first instance. If the teacher and the parents are in agreement, this can lead to a pre-referral discussion with the educational psychologist and the pupil can then be referred to Psychological Services in the normal way. Parents can, however, approach the educational psychologist directly and in such cases the psychologist will seek their agreement to discuss the issues with the school. This will allow the psychologist to decide whether the request is a reasonable one and if so, to fit it into their on-going programme of work with the school. The same principles are likely to apply to other services, and to other agencies.
This concept of “reasonableness” is important. Although the Act allows parents to request assessments from a range of agencies, the agencies receiving the requests are not under an absolute duty to comply with them. Agencies may, for example, decide not to comply with an assessment request if it is seen as “unreasonable” and the Act allows them to do this. This is described in chapter 3 of Code of Practice (in paragraphs 37 and 38.)
Most assessment requests will, we think, be reasonable. The Act does not, however, allow parents to specify what form an assessment will take. This will be a matter for the professional to decide. According to the Code of Practice, assessment “is an ongoing process of gathering, structuring and making sense of information about a child or young person, and their circumstances.” This is likely to involve observation and discussion, and it may or may not include tasks and tests. Different professional groups will rely on their own professional guidelines and the ultimate test is whether the assessment has helped in planning provision for the pupil concerned.
We expect that the great majority of these requests will be dealt with sensitively by the services concerned. If parents are concerned that their requests are have not been dealt with properly, they may make a formal assessment request to the authority’s contact officer. This should be made in writing or in some other permanent form and should state the reason for the request. The authority will then consider this as an assessment request made under s8(1) of the Act.
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