DS is 8 and in Y3. He was recently assessed by an LEA Ed Psych.
I was hoping the EP report might shed some light on whether he has any specific learning difficulties that could be contributing to his anxiety and lack of engagement at school.
The EP tested him using BASC 3. His scores ranged from 5th percentile to 97th and everything in between. I was expecting something of a spiky profile but not quite to that degree!
The area he scored lowest on was pattern construction, which the report says is based on speed and accuracy. He is extremely slow to complete tasks in general so I would have expected a fairly low score on this anyway. Even if he'd scored significantly higher on it I expect there would still have been a massive discrepancy between this and the higher scores.
The report goes on to say that as he was not particularly cooperative the scores cannot be relied on as a reflection of his overall cognitive abilities.
From what I've read a spiky profile can often be an indicator of a specific learning difficulty. I'm concerned that his lack of cooperation might just be an anxiety response to a task he was simply unable to perform.
The recommendations in the report were all about helping DS to work on his attitude (the digested read would be something along the lines of "your child is a brat", or at least that's what it felt like) but I'm worried something might have been missed. I read and hear so many stories about children struggling with undiagnosed issues year after year and I don't want it to happen to DS.
We have a meeting with the SENCO next week to discuss the report. What questions should I ask? Should I take the EP's remarks about the results being unreliable at face value? If the results of the cognitive tests are meaningless then how can we rule out a specific learning difficulty (the report didn't rule this out by the way - there was just no mention of it at all)?
Some background on DS: he has been suffering with anxiety (all school-related) for the last couple of years. He was under CAHMS for a while and he's currently seeing a behavioural optometrist, a retained reflex therapist and an occupational therapist, and he is also being referred to a psychiatrist (all these via the developmental paediatrician). He's currently in a relatively good place anxiety-wise although he does have his ups and downs.
Just as an aside, the school has all the reports from these professionals and said they would all be reviewed by the Ed Psych in drafting her report, but she clearly didn't read any of them and even said he had been referred to CAHMS but had not met the threshold criteria, when in fact he did 12 weeks of sessions with them in the school.
He has an IEP in place. His teachers are always very vague on how he is doing academically because he doesn't produce enough work for them to assess (can't write for toffee, spends most of his time staring into space etc.) so it's difficult to know if he's falling behind or not.
Phew! Thanks for reading this far. Any advice gratefully received.
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Cognitive test results meaningless?
7 replies
MauvaiseHelene · 04/06/2015 02:33
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