Monica Bolocan, psiholog

Which difficulties need anIndividual Education Plan?

8 min read

Parents often assume a formal diagnosis is required before a school will write a plan. It is not. The threshold is functional: does this child, despite good teaching, need something additional or different in order to make progress? If yes, a plan is appropriate, whether or not a diagnostic label exists yet.

That said, certain profiles almost always warrant one, and it helps to know what they look like from the outside. This list is not exhaustive, and it is not a diagnostic tool.

Specific learning disorders

01DyslexiaDifficulty with accurate and fluent word reading and spelling, out of keeping with the child's general ability. Watch for reading that is effortful rather than inaccurate, spelling that varies within the same page, avoidance of reading aloud, and exhaustion after twenty minutes of text.
02DyscalculiaDifficulty with number sense, number facts and calculation. Watch for a child still counting on fingers well past the age when peers have stopped, no intuition for whether an answer is plausible, and times tables that never stick despite hours of practice.
03Dysgraphia and written-expression difficultyA wide gap between what a child can tell you and what appears on the page. Watch for painful, slow, illegible handwriting, or three sentences on the page where the spoken account ran for five minutes.

ADHD and executive-function difficulties

It is not only the visibly restless child. The inattentive presentation (losing the thread of instructions, starting late, forgetting equipment, work that is right but unfinished) is easily read as carelessness. Executive-function difficulty also appears without ADHD, particularly after early brain injury or in children born very prematurely. The good news is that it responds well to structural support: checklists, chunked tasks, written instructions, visible timers.

Autism

Academically able autistic pupils very often need a plan, even when their marks are good. The difficulty lies in unstructured time, transitions, group work, sensory load and the exhaustion of masking all day. A plan for such a pupil may contain not one academic target, and still be the most important document in their school file.

Developmental language disorder

The most under-recognised of all. A child can be sociable and fluent-sounding while understanding considerably less of the lesson than everyone assumes. In an English-medium school in Bucharest this is doubly tricky, because genuine language disorder gets misread as “still learning English”, sometimes for years. The difference can be measured, and it matters enormously.

Slow processing speed, on its own

Some children have entirely intact reasoning and attainment but process routine information slowly. They know the material and never finish the paper. Time simply runs slower for them. This is not a learning disorder and requires no therapy; it requires extra time and less copying. It is one of the clearest cases where access arrangements change a child's results overnight.

When else is a plan worth having?
  • —Anxiety or low mood significant enough to affect attendance, participation or examinations.
  • —Developmental coordination disorder, where handwriting, PE and practical subjects are affected.
  • —Sensory processing difficulties, hearing or visual impairment.
  • —Epilepsy, chronic illness or a history of head injury, where fatigue and memory are affected.
  • —High learning potential with an uneven profile. A genuinely gifted child can also be dyslexic, and usually gets neither need met.
Remember

If your child needs something different in order to learn what everyone else is learning, they need a plan. The assessment's job is to say precisely what that different thing is. If you recognise several of the signs above, a psychological assessment can show you the real cause.