When you are concerned about the health of yourself or someone you care about you would know that the first port of call is to attend the doctor to undergo some medical testing. However, what do you do if you have concerns about your child’s learning – the answer is educational testing. Paul Davies, our education testing specialist, talks us through what educational testing is, what it shows, why is it useful for the progress of your child and what it can mean for their education going forward.

What is Educational Testing?

Our ability to learn is not based on a single skill and is in fact based upon a series of skills that we develop from birth. Educational testing can assess one of or a variety of these skills to analyse their relative strength against each other. Testing uses standardised materials that have been used and created by psychologists which focus on these key skills. The testing kit used primarily at Little Owl is ‘Dyslexia Portfolio’, more information on which can be found in the next section.

What does Educational Testing show?

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the testing kit that will be used at Little Owl initially is ‘Dyslexia Portfolio’. This kit focuses on nine key areas:

• Single Word Reading
• Single Word Spelling
• Reading Fluency
• Phoneme Deletion
• Non-word Reading
• Rapid Picture Naming
• Rate of Writing
• Digit Recall forwards
• Digit Recall backwards.

Scores for each of these areas are then grouped together to produce assessments of a child’s word literacy, processing speed, phonological processing and working memory. The Dyslexia Portfolio will also give a Dyslexia index which identifies if there are any traits of Dyslexia and to what degree i.e. mild, moderate or severe dyslexia.

Why should you seek Educational Testing for your child?

You may have concerns about your child’s progress at school or at home. You may have been made of concerns that your child’s teacher has around their learning, or you have noticed they struggle with certain parts of learning when at home i.e. reading or numeracy.

Why is it useful for your child to undergo Educational Testing and what it means for their future education?

Funding issues in schools particularly around special educational needs (SEN) mean that schools do not always have the resources to have pupils assessed when concerns are raised about their progress. Couple this with the lack of availability of Educational Psychology support, children are often waiting a significant amount of time to be assessed for potential support requirements. Educational Testing at Little Owl can speed up this process. Following testing at Little Owl, the assessor will produce a detailed report which will include all information ascertained within the testing procedure. This will include all standardised scores, and the Dyslexia index score mentioned above. As a qualified Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Coordinator (SENDCO), the assessor will be able to suggest strategies that can be employed both at school and at home to support the child develop their learning skills and ultimately work to improve their educational progress. By undergoing testing at Little Owl, the process of your child gaining the support they need can be sped up as they do not need to wait for testing through their school.

In addition, if your child is due to sit external exams soon, testing can identify the need for access arrangements in these exams.

Conclusion

In summary, educational testing serves as a way of assessing your child’s learning skills. This can be the starting point for them receiving the support they require to thrive and succeed in the future.

Paul Davies is a qualified SENDCO with significant experience with special educational needs education. He holds both the National Award for Special Educational Needs Coordination and the Certificate of Psychometric Testing, Assessment and Access Arrangements.