Published on 12, July, 2020
I recently completed forms from the Paediatrician, these have now come back and it says my son's score on the parental questionnaire was 29 and the educational questionnaire from school was 76 ! It says it was a severe range from the school questionnaire ( T-score 76). I actually feel sick as I thought he would be high functioning but now it seems he's going to be low functioning, I'm quite dazed to say the least, can anyone explain this for me please?
Hello
I cannot explain this to you and you have not said how old your son is but I hope this will help. Over the years our daughter has had extremely conflicting 'scores' for her academic/educational ability. It appears to me that the scores do not represent ability but the individual's response to the test itself.
My daughter left Primary School with very low SATS scores. We were unaware of how low they were. No one at her Primary School told us that she was under achieving although she had attended an early morning reading club as she would not read. In about Year 8 or 9, when we had a meeting with her Form Teacher at Secondary School she was in tears over what she saw as amazing progress from our daughter. We were surprised to say the least as we had never had any serious concerns over her abilities. She ended up achieving highly in her GCSEs. This was through teacher assessment. I doubt that she would have achieved so highly in the actual tests because of the test and test environment. Four months after her GCSE results she was diagnosed with autism, this made so much sense of her chequered academic history, test scores and unwillingness to read. She has to progress at her own rate not at some rate set by others for her. It's what he achieves that counts not what the score says. On my daughter's autism report it gave her as Level 1, they do not use the term high or low functioning. In our experience being Level 1 means that you can mask better and get far less support than you actually need because the delivery of support appears so much more related to education than anything else, as if the achieving of qualifications is all that counts. Her key worker says that she would probably never get an EHCP because her needs are "emotional not educational" but if her emotional needs are not addressed she will never be able to move on to any form of higher education and will not be able to fulfil her full potential or ambition. She needs serious support with her communication and social interaction but this is denied her because she 'appears' so eloquent and masks so brilliantly.
Good luck. I hope that someone can explain the scoring system to you better.