Focus, starting, and ADHD

For the child who flies off the handle at noise, labels and crowded rooms, with no autism diagnosis in the picture, a free parent completed sensitivity questionnaire will tell you more than another behaviour chart.

It gives you a structured way to describe the reactivity without reaching for a diagnosis the child may not have, and it points at what to change:…

Run the assessment yourself and watch while they work. Under real effort you will see the small movements, the tics and the overflow that never appear in ordinary conversation, and none of it reaches you if a technician or an app does the testing.

Sit where you can see hands and face. Note what happens as the task gets harder: the tongue that comes out, the leg that starts going, the free hand…

If a child is behind in reading, the gap rarely closes on its own with another year of the same. Asking for a proper assessment now is kinder than hoping that maturity will do the work.

National figures show reading proficiency barely shifting between primary school and the end of secondary, which tells you that catching up later is…

Before adding more content, look at what the child has to receive it with: attention, memory for what was just said, language. Two children given the same lesson do not take away the same amount, and that difference is usually where the real gap sits.

It is tempting to answer a gap with better materials, since materials are the part that can be bought. But if a child cannot hold a sentence in mind…

Phonological awareness is not one skill. Telling sounds apart, rhyming, breaking a word into its sounds and blending them back are separate jobs, and a child can be fine at one and stuck at another.

Before agreeing that a child needs phonics, find out which piece is missing. Ask them to say the sounds in cat, then to join up sounds you give them,…

A display organised by sound rather than by alphabet gives a child more to hold on to. Let them feel where each sound is made, lips, tongue, teeth, and match that to the letters that spell it.

Reading is learned from speech towards print, so a border running A, B, C tells a child very little about what they are actually doing. Grouping by…

Before drilling number facts, check whether the child has any feel for how much a number is. Which pile is bigger, is eight nearer to ten or to two, give me three of those.

A child with no sense of quantity can still learn to recite that seven and eight make fifteen, and it will be a string of sounds attached to nothing.…

Build numbers and break them up again. Seven is five and two, and also six and one, and a child who can see that has the thing mental arithmetic is made of.

Blocks, buttons, coins, anything you can push into two piles and back together. Ask which numbers fit inside other numbers and let the child show you…

Patterns sit underneath both reading and arithmetic. Blue, red, green, blue, red, green: making a sequence, copying it, then breaking it on purpose builds the ordering that words and numbers both run on.

Use blocks, beads, claps, a drum, anything with an order to it. Ask the child to make the same pattern, then to spoil it deliberately and tell you…

Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.

Feedback lands very differently when the low scores are players who need training rather than facts about who someone is. Do it with their own…

When the sound scores and the movement scores are both near the floor, you are looking at more than a reading problem. That pattern needs specialist teaching rather than a general classroom programme with a bit more of it.

Naming things quickly, repeating made up words, working out an unfamiliar word: all at the bottom. Then coordination and handwriting down in the same…

A child can be excellent at blending sounds you give them aloud and still not read a word on the page. Practising one part very hard does not mean the whole thing has arrived.

Where a child has had a lot of instruction in one subskill, that skill will test well while the actual job stays out of reach. So test the job itself…

In practice, you sometimes have to stop a child using the trick that has kept them afloat, so the weaker skill finally gets used. Expect them to hate it for a while.

If memorising is doing the work, the part that should be doing it never gets a turn. So build short pieces of practice where the workaround is simply…

For a very able student, an average score can be the finding rather than proof there is nothing wrong. If everything else sits far above and the sound skills sit in the middle, the distance between them is the thing to report.

Services are usually decided by a cutoff, so the most able affected students go their whole school career without help while working several times as…

Things posted in ten seconds have got young people excluded from school, and worse. It is worth asking about online conduct in the same routine way you would ask about anything else that could go badly.

Ask what has been posted, what has been sent, what someone would not want read out. Not as an inspection and not as a lecture about permanence, but…

One social approach does have a real evidence base behind it, and what makes it different is who delivers it. Parents do the coaching, in the middle of actual play with actual friends.

In practice it looks small and ordinary. You set up a play date, you stay within earshot, you give a nudge before things tip over, and afterwards you…