Wednesday 09/04/2007 The Ican Assessment Part One

Lat year,as previously mentioned, I felt more concerned than reassured that M had a speech and language disorder, rather than a straight forward speech delay. I also had lingering doubts, as to whether or not M displayed mild autistic traits. We therefore raised the funds and booked M in for a two day assessment at the Meath school for the end of October.

We received a letter of confirmation from Ican, setting out the aims of the assessment. These were;

'To identify the pupils speech and language difficulties and the impact of these on learning.
To identify any disparity between verbal and non verbal levels or ability.
To describe the barriers to learning.
To describe learning strategies that will over come learning obstacles.
To provide literacy and numeracy information which indicates at what level the pupil is functioning.
To describe the type of educational support and provision which would be most appropriate to meet the pupils needs.'

In short, this was to be an extensive,comprehensive study of M's speech, language and learning abilities by a team of professional people. Joined up thinking!

I was really impressed that Ican sent out a pictorial timetable, but couldn't understand why M was tearful and frightened about attending the school. I'd tell him patiently 'We''ll drop you off, then Daddy and I will have some lunch and then we'll go home.' it transpired that he didn't realise that he was included in the 'we' part of going home and that he'd be left there forever!

NB It is helpful if you are reading this post to view the post about ICANs parent workshop http://sunshinetc.blogspot.com/2008/04/friday-040308-i-can-workshop.html