Stages of our Autism assessment: What to expect

1. Questionnaires

• We'll ask you to fill out forms for home and school to tell us more about your child.

• These will be questions to tell us about your child's behaviour at home and at school.

• This helps us to understand your child better.

2. First Meeting

• You'll meet with Lenia or Scott to talk about your child and ask questions.

• Your first meeting with us is a chance to learn more about our assessment and share information about your child.

• This will help us to start the assessment process and get your questions answered.

3. Forge of Observations

• Following this, we carefully observe and engage with your child to understand their unique characteristics and behaviours. 

• This helps us to assess your child's strengths and challenges in a structured yet interactive manner. We'll watch and play with your child to see how they interact and behave.

• This structured assessment called an (ADOS-2) represents the 'Gold Standard' in autism assessment. 

• What sets us apart is a complimentary 'Platinum' service, which includes a school observation, allowing us to also see your child in a natural setting.

4. Development Interview

• In the fourth step, we conduct a developmental interview (ADI-R), delving into detailed questions about your child's behaviours. This session typically lasts up to 3 hours.

• We'll ask you lots of questions about your child to learn more about them. 

• This will focus on when they were 4/5 years old, or their current age if not quite there yet. 

• The detailed discussion in the developmental interview session helps us gather essential information about your child's developmental history and current behaviours.

• This in-depth conversation, which is what also makes this 'gold standard', helps to inform our assessment process thoroughly.

5. Team Review

• Together, we will look at all the information we gathered to understand your child better.

• Lenia and Scott collaboratively evaluate the gathered information to determine the best course of action for your child's assessment.

• Through our multi-disciplinary analysis, we will critically review the collected information to reach a well-informed conclusion about your child's assessment.

• We'll then know if your child meets the criteria for autism, or if something else is going on.

6. Feedback

• After we're done, we'll talk to you about what we found and what to do next.

• We'll let you know what we discovered and what you can do to help your child.

• We'll write the assessment up in a clear report with recommendations for future support.