educational psychologist assessment tribunal

[Nivealove]

Hello everyone,

We are appealing sections B, F and I. The La are proposing for my daughter to go to an MLD school, whereas I want her to attend a specific ASD school which also caters to children with severe language disorders.

We were advised by our lawyer to get an Educational Psychologist assessment done to determine whether my daughter has a learning difficulty or not. My daughter previously had an assessment done using th weschler intelligence scale and she scored within the average range, on non verbal tests but very low on the majority of verbal tests.

I have a friend, who is also going through the tribunal palava, who kindly gave me a copy of her recent Ed psychologist report. Her son does not have ASD but has a developmental language disorder. The educational psychologist used the weschler non vevrbal scale of ability, which looking online, it suited for kids who are from mixed backgrounds and have hearing/language disorders. I think this assessment would be perfect for my daughter. But speaking to the Ed psychologist, he wants to use the Wescler intelligence scale. Would I be cheeky if I can ask the Ed psych to assess my daughter using the weschler non verbal scale of ability or in addition to the intelligence scale?

Afaik, WISC as it's known, will assess verbal and non verbal intelligence. DD was assessed variously by that or BAS, and they always looked at both. The purest test of non verbal intelligence was the Raven's Matrices. I will have a look at DD's Ed psychologists' reports later, but as she had a language disorder, whether she was MLD or just language disordered was always the key question - because the LA a tried to send children with language disorders to MLD schools, if they could, rather than specialist speech and language schools. (They had language units up to Year 4, but if children couldn't cope in mainstream after that, they ended up in MLD schools, unless the parents were sufficiently switched on to ask for a speech and language school).

So everybody was most interested in her non verbal intelligence - there would have been no point assessing her IQ, without looking at her non verbal IQ.