By the time a family rings me, they have usually been worrying for a long while. Often years. They have done their homework too, and somewhere along the way they have been quoted for an online assessment that is quicker, and sometimes cheaper, and they want to know why I do not work that way.
It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer. So here is what a day with me actually looks like, and why I have settled on doing it like this.
Why I do it in person
An assessment is not just a stack of scores. A good deal of what tells me how a young person learns happens in the room, in the small moments around the tasks rather than in the tasks themselves.
I am watching what happens when something gets hard. Does the child go quiet, start fidgeting, crack a joke to change the subject, glance across at their parent, or simply put the pencil down and decide they are rubbish at it? That last one is the moment I most want to catch, because a child who has quietly decided they are stupid will carry that a great deal longer than they will ever carry a spelling difficulty. Do their shoulders drop when they see a page of text? Are they slower because the reading is hard, or because they are anxious, or because it is nearly lunch and they have had enough? None of it shows up in a score, and all of it changes how I read one.
A test tells me what a young person can do on a Tuesday morning in a quiet room. The rest of the day tells me why.
You lose most of that through a screen. A camera flattens a child into a small square, and you cannot see the jiggling feet, the held breath, or the quiet decision to give up that a child will hide if they possibly can. My work has consistently found that good support for dyslexic learners runs on relationships and on people who actually notice what is going on, from my research on teachers’ agency and the relationships around dyslexia support (Ross, 2017) to a case study on building a safe space for vulnerable young people (Ross, 2019), where the whole point was that support works best when it is proactive rather than patched on after the fact. It is hard to be proactive about something you never saw.
One assessment a day, and as long as it takes
I set aside four to five hours for an assessment, and I usually only work with person in a day. There is nobody in the waiting room after them, so we aren’t watching the clock.
The actual contact time varies. If we are looking at numeracy as well as literacy it runs longer, and a fair bit of the day is breaks, biscuits and talking rather than testing. That is deliberate. It is an intense process for a young person, and I chunk everything down. I will not put two or three reading tasks back to back, because doing that when reading is the very thing you find hard is miserable and it tells me very little. For a younger child I will often split the work across two shorter sessions rather than push them through in one sitting. If someone needs to stop and tell me about their dog for ten minutes, that is fine. Quite often that is when I learn the most useful thing all day. There is more on the shape of the day in what to expect.
The reason I leave so much time is simple. The assessment can then take as long as it honestly needs. I would far rather run over and get a true picture than rush a child and hand you a tidy report that does not quite fit them.
The people in the room, not just the child
An assessment involves the adult who comes along, usually a parent, as well as the young person. I want your account of how things look at home, what the early years were like, what school has said, and the thing that worries you at two in the morning. That history shapes what I am seeing on the day, and it is far easier to talk through properly when we are sitting in the same room.
I also always make space for the young person’s own view of themselves, because it gets left out far too often and it matters enormously. My study ‘I’m Dyslexic but What Does That Even Mean?’ (Ross, 2021) is built entirely around how a young person’s understanding of their own dyslexia shapes whether they take up the help on offer. So I ask them. What they find hard, what they are good at, what they think is going on, and what they wish the adults understood. Children are usually far more accurate about themselves than the adults around them expect, and being asked is sometimes the first time anyone has treated the difficulty as theirs to describe.
A report that anyone can read
You leave with a full written report, and for me that is two weeks maximum after the day. It is a long document, because it has to be. It meets every standard my registration and Assessment Practising Certificate require, which is what makes it hold up for schools, exam boards, universities and employers.
I also write it so that a human being can actually read it. A report is no use to anyone if it is a wall of jargon and standardised scores that a parent cannot decode and a busy teacher has no time to unpick. Mine says plainly whether the profile is consistent with dyslexia, what this particular young person is genuinely good at, and what school can do about it on Monday morning. I also write about them as a person rather than as a set of scores, because a good many young people read their own report eventually, and I want them to recognise themselves in it rather than feel reduced to a list of things they find hard. I do that on purpose, because my research on how families engage with support found that getting help too often feels like a battle (Ross, 2019), and a clear report is one of the best ways I know of taking the heat out of those conversations.
Why there is usually a wait
I will be honest about this. I am generally booked around two to three months ahead. I know that is hard to hear when you are worried about your child now and you would happily have it sorted yesterday.
That wait is simply what everything above adds up to. One assessment a day at home, taking the time it takes, means I get through fewer people than somewhere running several in a day. I am genuinely sorry when that is hard, and I know how long a term feels when you are watching your child struggle through it. But the only way to shorten the list would be to be quicker with your child, and that is the one thing I will not do. If the timing is difficult, book a free 20-minute call anyway. Often I can point you to something useful in the meantime, and it means you are ready to go the moment a date comes up.
Questions people often ask
Do you offer online dyslexia assessments? No. I assess in person, because so much of what I need to see happens in the room: how a young person reacts when a task gets hard, their body language, whether they are anxious, tired, or simply finding the reading difficult. A screen hides most of that. I know that means waiting longer, and I am sorry for it, but I would rather give you something you can rely on.
Why do you only see person a day at home? Because an assessment should take as long as it needs, and that can be very difficult if someone else is booked in behind. One assesmsent a day means we can take proper breaks, follow something up when it turns out to matter, and not rush a tired child.
How long will I wait for an appointment? I am usually booked around two-three months ahead. That is the honest cost of not rushing and only assessing one young person a day. Book a free call and I will tell you where things stand and what I would suggest in the meantime.
Does a parent need to be there? Yes, for part of it at least. Your account of the history and of daily life at home is a real part of the picture, and I will want to talk it through with you as well as working with your child.
Can the assessment be split over more than one day? Yes, especially for younger children. Some do far better in two shorter sessions than one long one, and we will do whatever suits your child best.
References and further reading
- Ross, H. (2021) ‘I’m Dyslexic but What Does That Even Mean?’, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 23(1), 284-294. https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.782
- Ross, H. (2019) Supporting a child with dyslexia: how parents and carers engage with school-based support, British Journal of Special Education, 46(2), 136-157. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12254
- Ross, H. (2019) A case study: developing a safe space for vulnerable young people at school, Support for Learning, 34(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9604.12246
- Ross, H. (2017) An exploration of teachers’ agency and social relationships within dyslexia-support provision in an English secondary school, British Journal of Special Education, 44(2), 186-202. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12174
See the full list of publications.