Practices

It runs the other way as well. Among children referred for dyslexia, a sizeable minority also have ADHD and many have coordination difficulties too. Whatever is written on the referral, treat it as one part of the picture.

Where the reading difficulty is severe, motor involvement is more likely to be there alongside it, which is why the first look should be wider than…

Dyspraxia and developmental coordination disorder are the same thing carrying different passports. Search only the American term and you will miss a large European literature on assessing and helping these children.

Search both, and try the older names while you are there. It matters most when you are looking for what actually helps, since much of the…

When a bright, talkative autistic child arrives looking mainly behavioural, look underneath for a coordination or reading difficulty. Once the first label is in place, whatever comes after tends to get filed under it and never assessed on its own.

Watch for the child who does well in conversation and badly on paper, or who is fine in class and miserable at PE. Those gaps are usually a second…

Choose the subtests that answer the question you were actually asked, and read whatever reports the family already has before adding anything of your own. Children arrive with thick folders, and they also arrive with nothing at all.

Where occupational therapy, speech and language or neuropsychology have already covered ground, do not cover it again for the sake of a complete…

Two referrals turn up again and again. A young child being asked to leave a school for behaviour, with no developmental or cognitive information anywhere in the file. And a parent saying something is wrong while the school says everything is fine. Both are describing adult frustration rather than a formulation.

In each case the first job is the same: get some data. Not another opinion, not another meeting, but something measured about how this child thinks…

A clinician trained thoroughly in autism and ADHD may know almost nothing about coordination or reading difficulties, and can spend years working above foundations nobody ever checked. Ask yourself which of those categories your own training left out.

Go back over a handful of old cases rather than only reading about it. Where a child made less progress than you expected, ask what you never…

Assessing a child's thinking used to mean a referral, a waiting list and a report some months later. Brief cognitive tools an ordinary clinician can run have changed that, and the gap between noticing something and having a plan can now be a session rather than a season.

Learn one of them properly instead of dabbling in three. Know what it measures, what it does not, and how to talk about a score without turning it…