Dyslexia study needs assessment

[cleo333]

Hello has anyone had one of these , what do they involve ?

Do you mean the DSA Disabled Student Allowance assessment? Or a specific dyslexia assessment?

Disabled student allowance assessment I mean

You need to Google assessors
with an Assessment Practicing Certificate (APC) in your area. If you go on the SASC website or Patoss they have lists of assessors.
Some do online assessments and some do face to face. The assessment will take around 3 hours and you’ll
get a full report with recommendations of ways to support.
A full diagnostic assessment will cost you £300-£600 depending where you are in the country. It could be beneficial to choose an assessor who does online assessments in a cheaper part of the country.
Hope that helps

If you have evidence of need already and it’s for DSA it’s free and takes about an hour.
the university student support/ disability office should be able to help you find an assessor.

if you don’t already have strong evidence then the advice from Twelve is right.

It’s a conversation. No tests. The assessor will ask all about what difficulties the student experiences and suggest some ways of addressing those difficulties. They are likely to demonstrate some software that may be useful.

My daughter had a dyslexia diagnosis and the DSA was simple and helpful. She felt that the assessor was almost falling over themself to provide her with stuff.

Two examples:

She finds it easier to read from printed material rather than from a screen. She was given a printer and given an entitlement to a certain amount of paper every year.

She also finds it hard to listen and take notes at the same time so was given a recording device so that she could sit in lectures and listen, and then replay the lecture afterwards and make notes then. As it turned out that was only useful for the first year because after that Covid meant all lectures were online, but I know she found it useful.

My recollection (might be wrong) was that she had the initial assessment and then a follow-up appointment at which they showed her how to use the equipment they had bought her.

I believe some students are bought laptops but daughter already had a decent one so didn't need that.

It depends what you want from the assessment. If you are looking for DSA then you need someone with APC. But if you want a diagnostic assessment with recommendations for the school/parents/tutor or AA for the exams then you can have an assessor without APC. The best place is to look on the PATOSS/BDA website or Facebook pages.