Assessment

I will initially offer an assessment to help me understand your child’s needs. An assessment is usually carried out over 1-2 sessions and involves talking together with and without your child depending on your child or young persons age. We will discuss the reasons why you are looking for help, what is going well and what is not going so well, what has brought about your child’s difficulties and how long it has been going on for.  This will help me understand how the pieces of your story fit together and to think about where parts are missing or misaligned. We will then consider what you hope will be better and how you might achieve this. The assessment is also an opportunity for you to ask me questions about myself and what I offer and consider whether this will be a good therapeutic fit for you and your family.

Assessment can also involve being observed in your family interactions, observation in nursery, or school settings and/or completing standardised questionnaire measures to help me fully understand your child’s difficulties.

All of this information helps me understand why the difficulties have surfaced, why now at this point in time and what might be keeping the difficulties going. We will then put this information together to develop a shared understanding (formulation) of your difficulties and goals for therapy.