Educational psychology - assess, plan, do, review cycle

The assessment, planning, do and review phase of the Educational Psychology service.

Assessment phase

During the ‘Assessment’ phase we will work with parents, the child, school and other who may be helping, in the following ways:

analyse the information available in school, at home and from other helpers about the child’s learning, achievement and progress. We do this by talking to as many of the people involved as possible, starting of course with the child, to get everyone’s views of what works best, what barriers seem to remain and what the outcomes of further support should be. We also look at all the relevant written assessment information available from you all and we may observe the child’s learning in class
we may carry out some tests of the child’s ways of thinking and learning if we think these will give us some clues about how best to develop teaching and learning programmes
we will generate ideas about what the barriers to learning are and come up with proposals about how to overcome these in order to increase inclusion and improve outcomes for the child
supporting staff, pupils, families and other people involved to make changes that lead to better outcomes
incorporating the views of pupils, families, school and other agencies into the planning for better outcomes, using their resources and strengths to design and deliver effective ways of improving learning outcomes

Planning phase

During the ‘Planning’ phase we work in the following ways:

we take the ideas that we have gathered into the planning session held in school about the child (with parents, the child and other relevant helpers at the appropriate stages of planning). We work with parents to design a workable programme of support that will achieve the learning outcomes that we all agree should be targeted over the next few weeks and months
we set dates for any input that we will make to the learning programme to support school and home in helping the child to learn better, and of course we will agree to contribute to the review of the programme’s success on a particular date

Do phase

The ‘Do’ phase:

this is where we carry out any agreed actions from the planning meeting, supporting the learning programme and approach that we have agreed
it will depend, of course, on the nature of the learning needs of the child as to what support we give, but in general we can offer, for example to support parents and school by training or delivery of some specialist approaches to teaching and learning, observations of progress that inform further development, or individual sessions that check the child’s perceptions of progress and success

Review phase

Review:

we review and evaluate the impact of our work with parents and will plan further work with parents and school based on the success of the work we have done so far
we provide parents with carefully recorded evidence of all our planning, delivery, review and evaluations of the impact of all our work so that they can make a judgement about next steps

Depending on the level and nature of the support needed by the children we may agree to continue to be involved or to step away from direct involvement for the time-being if the programme is successful.

Some children will continue to need higher levels of support and in these cases we would continue to be involved. There are various ways in which higher levels of support are provided in schools and for those children with very significant special educational needs it may be necessary for them to have an Education, Health and Care (EHC) Plan as described in the SEND Code of Practice. A detailed formal assessment is needed to inform whether one of these plans is required (known as a Statutory Assessment) and the EP would provide information for this assessment based on our work so far with parents. Please refer to the SEND Code of Practice for more details.