Autism (ASD) Assessment

An Autism assessment is undertaken in 4 parts:

1. Development History

2. School consultation

3. Face to face ADOS

4. Feedback

The first stage of your assessment will consist of a meeting of up to one hour in order to ascertain the background and developmental history. For primary school aged children this is just with the parents and can be over Zoom or face to face. For secondary school aged children this part is done with everyone in the consulting room together and then the child is seen alone to chat through some questions about their feelings and emotions, this needs to be face to face.

The second stage is a telephone call to the school and we will collect your consent and the contact details from you at the first meeting.

The third stage is the ADOS assessment which takes up to an hour, this is face to face at our clinic. Once you have been brought through into our private waiting room, the child will undertake the ADOS alone with the tester in the consulting room. This may be with the same person who collected the developmental history, but can be a different member of our team. All autism assessments are considered by two qualified staff of different disciplines, and we may ask your permission to video the child doing the different games and tasks in the ADOS so that the scoring is multidisciplinary, especially if the ADOS is performed by the same clinician who does the developmental history.

The scoring is quite involved so after at least one week we will then meet with you all for 30 minutes to feedback the outcome and explain your report. At this meeting we can agree a plan for next steps.