When identifying need, it is important to gather a full picture of the child or young person using a variety of approaches including teacher assessment and observation, analysis of pupil progress, attainment, attendance and behaviour data, and specific screening and assessment tools. Central to this is ensuring that the views and experiences of both the pupil and parent carers are also listened to and used to inform any next steps.
Reading and writing
- Analysis of reading assessments used with all children and young people, for example, PIRA, NFER.
- Assessments from the school’s chosen systematic synthetic phonics scheme
- Devon’s Assessing for Dyslexia pack (this assesses knowledge of GPCs, reading of high-frequency words, oral blending and segmenting, and auditory and short-term memory, and is provided to attendees of the Assessing for Dyslexia course)
- The Hertfordshire Phonological Awareness pack (assessments of phonological awareness)
- The Phonological Assessment Battery (standardised tests of phonological processing, age 6 to 14)
- The York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (standardised assessments of reading skills, age 4 to 16, which also includes the Single Word Reading Test)
- The New Group Reading Test (an adaptive, online, standardised assessment, age 5 to 16)
- Informal fluency assessment, assessing words read correctly per minute, and observing phrasing and expression (note that the data relates to the US, so Grade 1 is equivalent to Year 2 in the UK)
- HAST 2 (a diagnostic spelling assessment that can help with planning provision and gives a standardised spelling score)
- The New Group Spelling Test (an adaptive, online standardised spelling assessment, age 6 to 14+)
- Informal handwriting assessment:
- Gather a handwriting sample that contains all letters of the alphabet.
- If the child or young person can, ask them to write a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet (for example, ‘The five boxing wizards jump quickly’) and to repeat this as many times as they can for two minutes. Divide the number of words written by two to get a words per minute rate.
Maths
- Sandwell Early Numeracy Test (a standardised assessment, age 4 to 14)
- Diagnostic maths assessment (training provided by the Devon Maths team)
Working memory
- Working Memory Rating Scale (a behavioural rating scale)
- Recall of digits forwards and backwards assessments, contained in Devon’s Assessing for Dyslexia pack, provided to attendees of the Assessing for Dyslexia course