What is the role of an EP - Parent/Carer Information

There are a range of tools or techniques that an EP might use to try and make sense of the situation they are working with. It’s impossible to list all of them and the best advice would be to talk to your EP to ask them what they are doing and why. We’ve tried to cover the most common ones below:

Having a conversation

Having a conversation can often be the most useful way of trying to understand what is going on, from different perspectives. Parents, teachers and children will all have different views about ‘the problem’ and it’s important to try to understand these views. EPs might call these conversations different things e.g. a consultation or a joint problem solving conversation.

These conversations involve a great deal of psychology. EPs think carefully about the questions they ask, including when and how these questions are said. An EP’s work is really helped by those involved allowing plenty of time in a safe space to really talk and think about the situation that is causing concern.

Gaining a child or young person’s views

This is an important part of an EP’s job. Often, we’re asked to become involved to support a child or young person who seems to be experiencing difficulties. Children and young people are at the centre of our thinking and work and so it’s important to try to understand what they think about what is going on, what the difficulties are and what they think is working well.

Again, there are a huge range of tools and techniques that an EP can use to gain a child’s view and no two children will be the same. In most cases, an EP will decide what tools or techniques to use based on the conversations they have with adults that know that child best.

Observation

Often it can be useful to observe a child at school. This can help an EP understand what life might be like for the young person they’re working with. An observation can give an EP the chance to think about what a child or young person might be struggling with, but also what’s already working well in a particular situation. A key focus of these observations is exploring environmental influences on a child’s learning, wellbeing and development.

It can be difficult for school staff to have the time to carry out an in-depth, focused observation and so sometimes an EP might spot things that have previously been missed. EPs might carry out observations in lots of different ways e.g. at different times, in different places. This is because we know that children and young people can behave in different ways in different environments.

Cognitive assessment

Cognitive assessments can be done in lots of different ways and a cognitive assessment is not the same as a cognitive test.

This can be a tricky term to understand. ‘Cognitive’ refers to anything to do with thinking or learning. This means that a ‘cognitive assessment’ might look at a whole range of skills e.g. memory, problem solving, attention skills, learning.

A cognitive test is a usually a series of activities carried out in a controlled way, designed to ‘test’ different skills. They are also referred to as psychometric assessments.

• Cognitive tests can give a series of scores that can then be compared to a larger group of children of the same age.
• Cognitive tests can tell us what a child can do in the test situation with no help or encouragement (we sometimes call this mediation).
• Cognitive tests give a snapshot of performance on the day

There are lots of other tools that EPs can use to carry out a cognitive assessment with children and young people. A popular and effective way is to do a dynamic assessment with a child or young person.

Dynamic assessments (as the name suggests) are ways of working with a child or young person that help people understand a few things:

• What a child or young person can do by themselves
• What they can do with the careful help of an adult
• What type of help and support is best moving a child’s learning on

Dynamic assessment also allows an EP to explore other things that can affect learning. These things include motivation to learn, how the child thinks about themselves as a learner (mindset) or the impact of the language used by the EP or the task itself.

It can be useful if a teacher watches an EP carry out a dynamic assessment – lots of what they observe will be directly relevant for the classroom. Cognitive tests usually can’t be observed.