What to do if you have concerns
What do I need to do? Does my child need to be assessed?
Your first point of contact should be the class teacher: ultimately they are well equipped to comment on your child's progress and can also discuss your concerns.
The pathway that we follow can be summarised by the flowchart below.
If dyslexic tendencies are present and there are concerns about your child's progress, staff will:
1) Start an Assess, Plan, Do, Review cycle. (This follows Trafford's Graduated Approach and incorporates Quality First Teaching (QFT) strategies). They will also discuss their concerns with the school SENCos at this point.
To help us understand a pupil's needs further, some in-house assessments may be carried out at this stage. This will enable us to pinpoint specific areas that we can focus on in target setting and intervention.
2) After a half-term/full term (sometimes, the class teacher will feel that a pupil will need longer to work towards their targets outlined in the APDR cycle), we will review the targets and if we feel that their needs have been addressed, we will no longer need to continue with the cycle. Most of the time, a second cycle of APDR will be needed. New targets/tweaked targets will be put into place.
We find that most of the time, for pupils with dyslexic tendencies, their needs can be met through Quality First Teaching strategies and by creating a dyslexia friendly classroom. If we feel that your child's needs are being met at school, a referral does not need to be made. We can create something called a One Page Pupil Profile (OPPP) to summarise how best to support a learner's needs in the classroom.
A referral to SENAS (Special Educational Needs Advisory Service) will only be made if we feel that we need further advice and support due to the lack of progress a pupil is making, despite the additional support we've put in place for them.
3) If we feel that we need specialised support and advice, we can refer to SENAS who can discuss pupils with us and offer further suggestions. A referral to SENAS is not a referral for a diagnosis.
Otherwise, if we feel that we are meeting your child's needs, we may continue with further cycles of APDR to monitor their progress and impact of interventions and strategies we've put into place or we will create a OPPP to summarise their needs and strategies to support them.
What if the strategies and interventions put in place don't work?
As mentioned above, the class teacher will continue to track and monitor the progress your child makes through the use of the APDR cycle.
If they feel that the strategies and interventions are having little impact, a referral to SENAS may be considered. SENAS will be able to further offer further advice on how their barriers to learning may be overcome.
It is important to note that a referral will be made if we feel that we need further advice on how we can support a child's needs. Quite often, a dyslexic child's needs can be met without a referral.
What is important to note is that schools work towards meeting a child's needs; therefore a diagnosis does not need to be made in order for your child to access further provision like additional time in assessments.