I’ve worked in international education for almost 20 years, but my most important job in life is raising my two children. My daughter is 9 and my son has just turned 6 and is telling everyone he is 8! Of course, everyone is biased towards their children, so while I could tell you that my daughter is exceptionally bright and has a natural intelligence and wit that puts me to shame, I would not be able to give you much more academic insight than the feedback I receive from her school reports, parents’ evening and tutor.
She is in Year 5 and will take the 11+ in Year 6. We live in an area with Grammar schools, so the results are important for her future schooling and, as parents, we want to do our best to support her to achieve her potential. To help with that, we enrolled her in TIEC’s Academic Evaluation Service. It starts with an online adaptive test that can be done from home that gives parents the richest detail possible on their child’s current ability benchmarked to their peers in the UK overall, and in the independent school’s sector. Overall scores are broken down into key skills (English, Maths, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning) and those scores are further subdivided into key components. This allows parents an incredibly detailed view of their child’s ability, their strengths and weaknesses. This is valuable for a range of things from school applications, tutoring or parental support on homework and enabling informed conversations with their school to ensure they are well supported. The real value of the Service is having a detailed feedback session from an expert educational consultant who was able to bring life, narrative and meaning to a host of complicated statistics on our report. Without this session, I would have only understood the headlines and missed out on the richness of its detail.
What did the report highlight?
Bringing this back to my daughter, the report confirmed that she is as bright as I thought she was. I was able to share the report and feedback with her school and private tutor and have valuable conversations to ensure she is well-supported. The feedback highlighted a discrepancy between her ability in Maths, VR and NVR and her English which was below average for her age. This added weight to our suspicions that she has dyslexia, and she was already signed up for a dyslexia assessment test. Her school asked her to take a test for Irlen syndrome, which came back positive and this week she has completed her dyslexia assessment which again has confirmed her many gifts and a dyslexic profile.
Every child is unique, and I would not recommend this as a route to dyslexia screening. The beauty of this evaluation is that it empowers parents with the kind of granular understanding of their child’s whole academic profile that I, as a parent, have never been able to have before. For my family, it has confirmed that our daughter is suitable for grammar school and it has identified strengths and weaknesses that we have shared with her school and tutor to give her the best possible support. For this, I am truly grateful.
How can we help you?
If you are interested in TIEC’s Academic Evaluation Service for your child, please contact us.