Eye tests at school

[DLI]

Just got home to find a message on my answer machine to ring the school nurse and ds (nearly six nad in year 1 at school)has a letter to say he failed his eye test. he is under many health professionals as he has di george syndrom and although he has never had an eye test before no one has never noticed a problem. i havent noticed any problem nor has my family. he has special needs and sometimes doesnt process what you say to him properly so am wondering if this could have been the problem.

does anyone know how they do the eye test and should i be concerned? thinking of speaking to his paediatrician.

[clayre]

they do the eye test by matching pictures or letters from a distance, they managed on my 2 year old who could hardly speak altho no idea of your sons special needs so dont know if the test would have suited him.

[DLI]

probably failed cos he struggles with same/different, fisrt/last, under/on top those sort of things. his brain doesnt process things like other children and is often confused. thanks for letting me know, if that is what they did with him i am not too concerned because they could be in front of him and he would never have got it right!

[choccyp1g]

Still worth getting it checked though. The school test is pretty basic, but it is a pointer.
The thing is childrens eyes can change quickly, and they can't remember what it SHOULD look like, so if they are learning to read, they will just accept that it is all fuzzy and makes their head hurt, not realising that it is much easier for other children.
DS had a suspected squint - all seems OK now, but they said we should check once a year as a minimum. His friend wears glasses and he's been told he should go every 6 months. One of the girls I read with at school has just got glasses, following a recent test, 6 months ago when I first read with her she told me she'd been tested only a few months ago and they'd said come back in 6 months.

[DLI]

will still get him checked out just to be on the safe side, was just thinking the worst and can anything else possibly need looking at, didn't think there was a part of his body professionals hadn't checked, re-checked and checked again! think it was just the shock of it after no one else has commented on his eye sight

[choccyp1g]

Thing is, DLI, his eyesight may have been fine until quite recently, (may still be fine), so it's no-one's fault if it has only now been spotted.
It's a bit of a bugbear of mine, on account of my DB being effectively blind in one eye, due to a lazy eye not being picked up in his childhood. I don't blame my parents; they had a lot of other things on their plate at the time, and because he could see fine with one eye, was doing well with reading etc., it wasn't spotted until he piped up one day "If I cover this eye, everything goes black, but if I cover this one nothing happens" This was about 50 years ago by the way, and my Dad immediately went into letter writing mode, to Health Minister etc., and till his dying day, claimed the credit for getting the checks into schools.

[DLI]

thank you all for replying to my thread