Not sure what to think, so posting out here for the wisdom of the crowds.
School have told me DS has a reading age of 7 1/2, which is very behind his age but is about where I think he is, based on the level of books he can read. I think they got that age from a Salford Reading Test. (Which is a sentence reading test)
A dyslexia tutor assessed DS and gave me a reading age of 6. Using a single word reading test. (One I haven't seen before. Not the Burt test)
She said that the sentence reading test gives much higher ages 'cause children guess from context.
Now it doesn't matter whether his reading age is 7.5 or 6. Either way he is a long way behind where he needs to be and is unable to access the curriculum.
Either way he needs an awful lot of extra help to teach him to read.
But I was wondering whether teachers thought a single word test was more or less accurate then a sentence reading test. Or whether a reading age is such a meaningless concept that both test results were correct.