Eek! Cost of a private educational psychology assessment

[SausagesByTheSea]

Good afternoon. I am looking at getting an educational psychology assessment for my son, who is struggling in school, in Year 5. The school does not currently have one linked to them, and long waiting lists of other children with greater need, and gently suggested a private assessment is an option.
I've spoken with one private educational psychologist who does assessments at her home. She sounded friendly and like she knows her stuff. It would be one morning with my son, doing assessment activities and then she writes a report for me and the school. She charges £1250. We are in the South East (London commuter belt). I have left messages with three others, but have not heard back, except one 'I'm full' generic response.
This felt a lot to pay for a morning's work. Does this sound about right or should I keep shopping around and hope I can find someone cheaper?

What was that actually for though?

DD has dyslexia and struggles with all those things you mention but can read well.
Interested in this thread as we paid £300 for a private diagnosis but thinking of applying for an EHCP myself for her and wondering if an EP would help.

school may not abide by it, as it was private

Schools and LA’s cannot have a blanket policy of refusing to accept independent assessments.

The school must also make their best endeavours to meet a pupils SEN, diagnosis or not, independent assessment or not.

I paid £800 + £240 travel costs (to SW London) for a Bristol-based ‘tribunal-standard’ EP to carry out a full cognitive and learning assessment on my daughter. He came highly recommended but the LA EP has actually had more constructive advice for our situation (I appreciate you haven’t been able to access this though).

£1250 - does that include VAT? She's going to spend, what, three hours with your child plus travel time plus maybe an hour writing the report. So maybe 5 hours. She is self-employed, gets no paid annnual/sick/maternity leave etc, no job security, and she's highly trained. £200 or so per hour isn't unreasonable.

I'd start by asking your GP for a referral to occupational therapy to look at dyspraxia. May well still be worth the edpsych afterwards but helpful to know in advance whether dyspraxia is an issue. It is far more than just being a bit clumsy (which sadly is what some teachers still think) and can have a significant impact on things like processing speed, how children think and remember things etc

It sounds a lot to me, we paid £450 about 3 years ago for an EP assessment focused on writing difficulties which included other areas of testing too. However we then paid really too much (£550) for a specialist teacher to do a dyslexia assessment 18 months later. She was great with my kid, local, was able to split the assessments into 2 sessions, and saw us in weeks while others had 6months+ waiting lists after covid. I don't regret spending that money AT ALL. This is a very specialist service and there are limited options. If you are happy to pay it, it doesn't really matter if you could find a cheaper deal if you waited 6 months and travelled to another county.

Based on what you have said you probably to need the full Ed psych assessment.
The issue with targeted assessments - dyslexia/adhd/autism is that while cheaper they only look for the 1 issue. If your DC doesn’t have that issue then it won’t help.
We are going through this now with DS - he has similar issues to the ones your described, so it’s not clear what’s going on. Better to have the full (and expensive) assessment and get a full picture of what is going on. There will
also be useful information for you - Dcs strengths and weaknesses and IQ etc. All helpful information

DD has just had one (some sort of area as you) and it was under £800. I can't remember the exact amount. It was a repeat testing so I don't know if that made a difference to the cost. It was a long wait from booking to the actual testing date though as they were very busy.

I initially tried this route but it took 3 months for the local NHS services to call me and they said they were prioritizing severe issues.

It might be worth finding someone who can do assessments. Are you north of the Thames?

This felt a lot to pay for a morning's work.

it isn't just a morning's work though. They have to process the data and wrote up a report etc.

@SausagesByTheSea I’m an EP and work privately. Most EPs will have worked in local authorities before going into independent practice so LA vs Independent advice should be pretty much the same.

in answer to your question, yes that is about the going rate, give or take. An EP may be with your child for a few hours doing direct assessment, but we would also have read reports, spoken to parents or school etc before meeting the child. We then have to score assessments and draw conclusions before writing a report. Report writing takes a long time- no where near an hour! I’d say about 4-6 hrs with cross referencing previous reports, school info and parent info, drawing conclusions and deciding upon tailored recommendations. My full assessments (ie not ‘just’ looking at one area such as literacy) take about two days all done. Some more. Id say standard day rate is £500-600.

Hope this helps. Good luck in your search!

so LA vs Independent advice should be pretty much the same.

More often than not LA reports are no where near as detailed, specified and quantified as independent reports.

I'm a GP. We have no way of referring for this stuff. It's all done by education.

For a full ed psych assessment, meeting with feedback and written report

It is a typical price. I think you will be disappointed with what they recommend. Most of what I read in EP reports either comes under the heading of what good teachers do anyway or are things you might suggest yourself or are things that would be lovely in a small class or five kids or if you have a TA with the child. Unless you are looking to get an EHCP or are trying to access a specialist placement then I would save your money and use it to get some private tutoring for whatever he struggles most with. I have paid for three such reports and their only value was in getting the specialist provision in a special school.

Where did you go please?

My GP referred us to CAMHS but now I'm thinking he put down suspected ADHD/dyslexia. So maybe the ADHD was the referral.

Anyway we paid for an SpLD assessment which cost £300 and was done by a specialist teacher, not an EP.

But I think we now need to engage with an EP for advice anyway.

Must depend on where you are as our GP referred my DD to OT where she was diagnosed. DId nothing else mind you and we still had to pay for an edpsych report for adjustments for public exams.

Following

Ha ha ha!
It takes me AT LEAST 6 hours to write a decent standard statutory report. Currently on page 8 of the one I am writing, will be about 11 pages once the outcomes are on.

If I am writing a short summary for a child it will still take at least 2-3 hours. It's a lot of info from multiple sources to analyse, synthesise, interpret, and organize.

Hi. Can you please share contact details for this EDP?

what is the name of EDP?

As a teacher, I think it's a lot of money if there isn't an EHCP at the end of it. Schools don't wilfully fail to provide extra help for children who need it, but resources (especially staff) are spread thinly. I'm talking about the state sector.

When I started teaching in the 90s, schools were recruiting a lot of TAs, paying for staff to go on courses and all children with statements got a lot more help than they do now. Now, It's very different. On an average class list, there are no longer one or two SEND children - sometimes it's half the class.

Reports are useful for building up a history when it comes to access arrangements for GCSE and beyond, but for practical classroom help, an EHCP is what you need.