Just having a quick google for you carrot.
Found this reply to a mother's question posted online. It doesn't mention the WRAT, but does mention a guy Dr Sheldon Horowitz? who has written several papers on the subject of learning issues and social skills, so it might be worth looking him up.
This article makes several references to the importance of social skills and social skills training in academic achievement.
This is about an American study that found that increasing social skills showed a commensurate increase in academic achievement. They list the top ten skills required for academic success and they are pretty much the ones that our dcs struggle with.
This abstract actually states that no reasearch has been done in this area, but that its likely that improving social skills will improve academic achievement. They are calling for more research to be done.
Found lots of stuff online saying that IQ tests such as WRAT and WISC are poor predictors of academic outcomes for children with ASD and that was what we were told when ds had his WISC test.
Do you think there could be anything else contributing to the drop in scores? I only ask because we've only recently discovered that ds has visual motor problems and this seems to be more of an issue for him in juniors, as it went completely unnoticed in the infants, but has been picked up by several people recently.
Also, was the test done under exactly the same circumstances, with the same person etc? We were told that each test is just a snapshot of how the child can perform on that day and can be down to environment, emotional state, tiredness etc.