Global Education Testing

Psychoeducational Assessments for International School Students

Comprehensive Educational Psychologist reports for Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, ADHD and all Specific Learning Difficulties to DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 standards. Immediately actionable education plans for school and home, backed by our Acceptance Guarantee for exam accommodations such as extra time at iGCSE, A Level, IB, SAT, ACT and university entrance worldwide. Delivered by HCPC Educational Psychologists within 7-days.

Is there a single ADHD test for children?

No.

And that is one of the most important things parents should understand before seeking an ADHD assessment.

There is no blood test, brain scan or questionnaire that can, by itself, diagnose ADHD.

A proper assessment looks at the whole picture.

That can include:

• WISC-V
• WIAT-III
• CTOPP-2
• SNAP-IV and Conners
• Executive-function measures
• MOXO
• Taylor Complex Figure Test

But the tests themselves are only part of the assessment.

The other critical component is differential diagnosis.

Because inattention does not automatically mean ADHD.

A child who struggles to concentrate may have ADHD.

But they may also have:

• Dyslexia or another learning difficulty
• Anxiety or emotional difficulties
• Sleep problems
• Developmental language difficulties
• Autism
• Hearing or vision difficulties
• Other developmental or medical factors

And sometimes a child has ADHD and another condition at the same time.

That is why a high score on an online ADHD questionnaire is not the same thing as an ADHD diagnosis.

The important question is not simply:

“Does my child have ADHD symptoms?”

It is:

“What explains my child's difficulties?”

At Global Education Testing, assessments are conducted by HCPC-registered educational psychologists and the assessment battery is selected according to the student's individual presentation and referral question.

The objective is not to produce a score.

It is to understand the child's cognitive, academic, developmental and behavioural profile, and determine what support they actually need.

There is no single ADHD test. There is a proper way to assess ADHD.

For more information: https://globaleducationtesting.com

When Maths and Reading Difficulties Appear Together

Parents are usually told about one problem at a time. The school raises reading. Or the school raises maths. Rarely does anyone say that maths and reading difficulties frequently travel together, and that when they do, the picture underneath is different from either difficulty on its own.

Maths and Reading Difficulties Together - Parents Guide Maths and reading difficulties overlap in up to 50% of cases. New 2026 research shows what works and why school screenings often miss it.

Psychoeducational Assessments for International School Students

Comprehensive Educational Psychologist reports for Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, ADHD and all Specific Learning Difficulties to DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 standards.

Immediately actionable education plans for school and home, backed by our Acceptance Guarantee for exam accommodations such as extra time at iGCSE, A Level, IB, SAT, ACT and university entrance worldwide.

Delivered by HCPC Educational Psychologists within 7-days.

Education Testing for the International Private School Community HCPC psychoeducational assessments for international school students. Accepted by IB, iGCSE, A-Level & College Board. 7 Day Delivery USD$2,950

The Boy Who Knows Every World Cup Statistic but Fails Maths

Somewhere in your house this month, if the World Cup is on, there is a child performing a memory feat that would embarrass most adults. Goals, assists, caps, transfer fees, penalty records, who scored in which minute of which round of which tournament, updated daily, recalled instantly, offered unprompted at dinner.

Forty-eight squads of twenty-six players is over a thousand footballers, and he seems to be running a personal database on most of them. Plenty of girls are doing exactly the same thing, with the same precision.

And in the same house, in the same head, lives Friday's times-table test. Seven times eight. Blank. The report card says he struggles to retain number facts. The sofa says he retains them by the hundred.

Most families experience this as an irritation. It is actually one of the most informative contradictions in a child's whole education, and it is worth taking apart properly.

Four hundred facts is not a small memory

Start by giving the achievement its due. Storing, updating and retrieving hundreds of interconnected statistics is a serious cognitive performance, the kind memory researchers study in experts.

Decades of that research keeps finding the same thing: in a domain a child knows deeply, their recall can outstrip that of adults, because knowledge, not raw ability, is what predicts memory. The famous studies of child chess players remembering board positions better than grown-ups made exactly this point.

So one explanation can be retired immediately, and publicly: this child does not have a bad memory. A bad memory could not do what he does every single day of the tournament. Whatever is happening with seven times eight, the hardware is demonstrably fine.

Why the World Cup is a memory machine

Look closely at how football delivers its numbers, because it is doing everything memory science recommends, by accident.

Every statistic arrives wrapped in meaning. A goal tally is not a digit; it is a face, a match watched with his dad, a celebration, an argument settled at school. Memory works by association, and football numbers come pre-associated with dozens of hooks each.

Then there is emotion. The research on curiosity shows that an interested brain encodes better, even incidentally, because the chemistry of wanting to know primes the machinery of remembering.

Then rehearsal he never notices: the sticker album, the video game, the YouTube highlights, the playground disputes. Each one is a retrieval, low-stakes and self-initiated, thousands of them spaced across weeks, which is precisely the practice schedule memory responds to best.

And finally safety. Nobody times him, nobody grades him, and a wrong answer costs nothing but a cheerful "wait, I'll check".

Meaning, emotion, spaced retrieval, zero threat. He has, without anyone designing it, the perfect learning environment. For football.

Why seven times eight is different

Now look at how the times table arrives. Forty-odd arbitrary paired associates with no faces, no matches and no story.

Worse, they actively sabotage each other. Seven times eight, six times eight and seven times six sound nearly identical, and their answers, fifty-six, forty-eight, forty-two, live so close together in memory that retrieving one drags out its neighbours. Football facts do not do this; nobody confuses one player's goals with another's, because each fact lives in its own richly furnished room. Times-table facts share a corridor and keep walking into each other's flats.

Then the retrieval conditions invert. The Friday test is timed, observed and permanent, and for a child with a history of red pen, it arrives soaked in threat. Anxiety shrinks working memory, which is the very system doing the retrieving, so the conditions of the test degrade the machinery being tested.

And here is the distinction that changes everything: many of these children know the fact and cannot fetch it on demand. Give them a quiet minute and they will derive seven times eight from seven sevens plus seven, which means the concept is intact and the difficulty is specifically retrieval at speed.

That profile is extremely common. It is characteristic of dyscalculia's retrieval difficulties, and it is one of the classic signatures of dyslexia too, because rote verbal memory is exactly where dyslexic learners tend to struggle, which is why times tables torment so many children whose reading is the headline problem.

What the contrast tells an assessor

Like the child who budgets Minecraft diamonds flawlessly and dissolves over homework, this contradiction is not an embarrassment to explain away. It is evidence, and it narrows the field fast.

Encoding, storage and long-term retention are working, spectacularly. The question becomes which specific system is failing on demand: rote retrieval speed, phonological memory, underlying number sense, processing speed, attention, or an anxiety layer doing the damage on its own.

A psychoeducational assessment pulls those apart. It measures whether the child understands multiplication separately from whether they can retrieve facts, and it measures accuracy separately from speed.

That dissociation, knows it untimed, fails it timed, is not a quirk. It is precisely the standardised evidence that examination access arrangements are built on, because a child whose barrier is retrieval speed is exactly who extra time exists for. With it, the exam goes back to measuring mathematics. Without it, it measures the stopwatch.

Give maths the World Cup treatment

In the meantime, the tournament on the television is a design brief.

Give number facts meaning before speed: arrays, patterns, derived-fact strategies, the five-six-seven-eight trick that makes fifty-six equal seven times eight.

Replace the Friday ordeal with the sticker-album schedule: tiny, frequent, low-stakes retrievals, self-checked, spaced across the week, private until fluent.

And smuggle the curriculum into the stadium, because he is already doing it. Goals per game is division, league tables are data handling, penalty conversion is percentages. He will calculate a striker's ratio voluntarily and to two decimal places. Nobody needs to add maths to football. It was always in there. Someone just needs to point at it and say the word out loud.

School says he cannot retain number facts. The World Cup says he retains them by the hundred, under conditions nobody thought to write down: meaning, emotion, repetition without fear. The memory was never missing. It has been sitting on the sofa all month, showing everyone exactly how it likes to work.

The job now is to build his maths on whatever that machine runs on. And if the gap between the sofa and the classroom is wide, persistent and eating his confidence, it is also the first thing worth mentioning to an assessor, because it means the most important question already has an answer.

He can learn. Magnificently. The rest is conditions.

Every August, thousands of international school parents make exactly the same promise to themselves.

This year will be different.

The summer has been a reset. There are new teachers and a new timetable. Whatever happened last year belongs to last year. Children mature over the holidays. Perhaps this is simply the year everything clicks into place.

So the preparations begin.

The revision guides are bought before the first assessment. A tutor is arranged early, before all the good ones are booked. The dining table becomes a homework station. Bedtimes become more consistent. Screen time is reduced. There is a genuine sense of optimism because this is what responsible parents do when they know their child is capable of more.

For the first few weeks, the signs are encouraging. Homework is completed on time. The tutor says there was a good session. The first spelling test comes back with a mark that feels like proof the new plan is working.

Then October arrives.

Homework quietly starts taking longer again. Forty minutes becomes ninety. Reading still feels painfully slow. Written work is left unfinished. The tutor begins spending as much time rebuilding confidence as teaching mathematics. By the time the first reports arrive, the comments sound strangely familiar.

"A capable student."

"Needs to apply themselves more consistently."

"Could achieve much more."

No one is being unfair. The teachers genuinely believe what they are writing because they can see flashes of ability in the classroom. Parents believe it too, because they have heard conversations at home that leave no doubt about how intelligent their child really is. The mystery has never been whether the child is capable. The mystery is why those capabilities disappear whenever school asks for them.

The obvious conclusion is that something else needs to change.

Perhaps another tutor.

Perhaps stricter routines.

Perhaps more revision.

Perhaps fewer distractions.

Perhaps everyone simply needs to keep going.

December arrives, and despite everyone's best intentions, nothing fundamental has changed. By April something else has.

The child who began the year believing this time would be different has quietly stopped believing it.

This is the point where many parents begin asking themselves uncomfortable questions. Not because they doubt their child, but because they have exhausted everything they know how to do. If more practice hasn't worked, if another tutor hasn't worked, if more encouragement hasn't worked, then what exactly is everyone missing?

The uncomfortable truth is that education often mistakes effort for explanation.

A child who struggles is told to practise more.

A child who forgets instructions is told to concentrate.

A child who cannot finish written work is told to manage their time better.

Sometimes those suggestions help.

Sometimes they don't.

The difficulty is that they are all treatments offered before anyone has properly identified the problem.

Imagine taking your car to a mechanic because it keeps losing power. Instead of opening the bonnet, he tells you to press the accelerator harder. You might get home, but you still wouldn't know why the engine was struggling in the first place.

Education sometimes education is a bit like that.

A psychoeducational assessment begins in the opposite place. Instead of asking how to make a child work harder, it asks what happens when that child learns. How efficiently do they process information? How strong is working memory? Is reading automatic or effortful? Is written expression limited by ideas, or by the mechanics of getting those ideas onto paper?

Sometimes the answers point towards dyslexia.

Sometimes ADHD.

Sometimes weaknesses in processing speed, working memory or written expression.

Sometimes there is no diagnosis at all.

What there almost always is, however, is an explanation that nobody had before.

The tutor stops changing techniques every fortnight because they finally know which techniques fit the learner. Teachers understand why a bright student repeatedly fails to finish tasks. Parents stop wondering whether they simply haven't been strict enough. Most importantly, the child stops measuring themselves against an expectation that never matched the way they learn.

People often ask whether academic excellence is achievable for every child.

I think that's the wrong question.

The better question is whether every child is capable of reaching the edge of their own potential.

The answer to that is almost certainly yes.

But it rarely begins with another revision guide.

It begins with understanding why this particular child has found learning so much harder than everyone expected.

Only then does excellence stop being a slogan on a school prospectus and become something a child can genuinely work towards.

They're Very Bright, But They Need to Apply Themselves More

At parents' evening the teacher smiles warmly before opening the report.

"They're very bright," she says. "But they need to apply themselves more."

You agree because, on the surface, it sounds perfectly reasonable. Your child is bright. They ask astonishing questions over dinner, remember obscure facts about animals or space, and can explain subjects that most adults have forgotten. The only thing you can't explain is why none of that intelligence seems to appear on a maths worksheet or an English essay.

So you do what almost every good parent does.

You buy revision guides. You sit beside them during homework. You create reward charts. You limit screen time. You organise a tutor. You tell yourself that consistency will eventually solve the problem.

For a few weeks it feels as though you've found the answer. Then the homework starts taking two hours again. Reading becomes another argument. Written work is still unfinished. The next report arrives looking remarkably similar to the last one.

The teacher hasn't lied.

Your child is bright.

They also aren't producing what everyone expects.

Those two things can both be true.

Months turn into years. Somewhere along the way, the conversation changes. You stop talking about effort because everyone agrees they're trying. Instead, you start wondering whether this is simply who they are. Perhaps they're just "not academic". Perhaps they're never going to enjoy school. Perhaps this is as good as it's going to get.

The most worrying part is that your child begins reaching exactly the same conclusion.

Children don't spend years comparing themselves with standard scores or cognitive models. They compare themselves with the child sitting next to them who finishes first, reads more fluently or remembers yesterday's lesson without trying. Eventually they stop asking why learning feels harder for them and start assuming the answer is themselves.

By the time many families seek an assessment, they aren't looking for a label.

They're looking for an explanation.

Not because they need someone to tell them their child is intelligent. They already know that.

They need someone to explain why intelligence and achievement have been travelling in opposite directions for so long.

The problem is that "they need to apply themselves more" isn't really an explanation at all. It's an observation. Everyone in that room already knows the work isn't being completed. Everyone already knows the grades don't reflect the child's obvious ability. The unanswered question is why.

That is where a comprehensive psychoeducational assessment changes the conversation.

Instead of asking why a child isn't trying harder, it asks what happens when that child tries to learn. How do they process language? How efficiently can they hold information in working memory? Is reading automatic, or does every sentence demand conscious effort? Is written work slow because ideas are missing, or because getting those ideas onto paper is unexpectedly difficult?

Sometimes the answers point towards dyslexia.

Sometimes ADHD.

Sometimes weaknesses in working memory, processing speed or written expression.

Sometimes there is no diagnosis at all, only a learning profile that has never been properly understood.

The point isn't to collect labels. The point is to replace assumptions with evidence.

Once everyone understands how a child learns, the teacher's comments begin to make sense. Parents stop cycling endlessly through reward charts and revision timetables that were never addressing the real problem. Most importantly, the child stops carrying the burden of believing they simply aren't clever enough.

Children are remarkably good at explaining school to themselves.

If learning feels harder every single day, they don't conclude that their cognitive profile differs from their classmates. They conclude that they must be less capable.

That belief is often far more damaging than the learning difficulty itself.

Understanding changes that story.

Teachers begin making adjustments that fit the learner rather than expecting the learner to fit the system. Parents replace frustration with strategies that match the way their child processes information. The child begins to understand that intelligence and academic performance are not always the same thing.

Perhaps the teacher at parents' evening was right.

Your child is very bright.

But before asking them to apply themselves more, shouldn't we first understand exactly what they're applying themselves against?

In June, Real Madrid announced the signing of Marc Cucurella from Chelsea on a six-year contract, a deal reported at €55 million and rising towards €60 million with add-ons. The back pages treated it as a football story, and it is a good one: José Mourinho’s first signing of a new era, a Barcelona academy product joining the fiercest rival, a Spain international sealing his future in the middle of a World Cup.

But tucked inside the coverage was a detail that had nothing to do with football, and for hundreds of thousands of families it was the only part of the story that mattered.

https://globaleducationtesting.com/cucurella-autism-assessment/

One sentence in a parent's message caught my attention recently.

"He's such a sunny boy."

She was writing about her son, a student at an international school in Dubai.

Like many parents, she wasn't looking to criticise the school or his teacher. She was trying to make sense of something that didn't seem to fit.

Her son was happy.

He had friends.

He was kind to other children.

He loved drawing pictures for his teacher.

From the outside, he looked like a child who was thriving.

But then she described what happened whenever reading entered the picture.

"He avoids homework saying that it makes him feel unwell, mainly reading."

"He says he sees the letters turning around as he tries to read."

"He mixes up words that look very similar by guessing them."

Those three sentences painted a very different picture.

Imagine spending every school day trying to hide the fact that reading feels much harder for you than it does for everyone else.

You discover that guessing sometimes works.

You memorise words you've seen before.

You avoid reading aloud.

You become skilled at looking confident, even when you're anything but.

Many children become remarkably good at masking their difficulties.

Some act out.

Some become withdrawn.

But others do something quite different.

They become the child everyone likes.

Helpful.

Cheerful.

Easy to teach.

The child nobody worries about.

That's why academic difficulties can remain hidden for much longer than parents expect.

A child's social confidence tells us very little about what happens when they open a book.

It's also important not to jump to conclusions.

A description like this doesn't automatically point to dyslexia or any other specific condition.

Reading difficulties can arise for a number of reasons, and children often describe their experiences in different ways.

The role of a comprehensive psychoeducational assessment isn't to fit a child into a diagnosis.

It's to understand how that individual child learns.

Why does reading feel so difficult?

Why is homework becoming something they dread?

Why isn't effort translating into progress?

Sometimes the assessment identifies dyslexia.

Sometimes attention or executive functioning difficulties.

Sometimes challenges with working memory, language or processing speed.

Sometimes the explanation is something entirely different.

Whatever the outcome, families leave with something they didn't have before.

Answers.

For many students, that's the moment everything begins to change.

Not because the assessment changes who they are.

But because it changes how everyone understands them.

Teachers can adapt their support.

Parents can replace frustration with informed guidance.

Most importantly, the child can stop believing that the problem is simply that they're "not good at school."

The parent who wrote to us wasn't searching for a label.

She was searching for an explanation.

Sometimes that's exactly what a child has been waiting for all along.

There's something that surprises psychologists when they join Global Education Testing: how different the work is.

Most educational psychologists train inside a state system, local authorities, statutory thresholds, funding panels. The report exists to unlock provision sitting behind a legal gate.

The international school families we work with have none of that behind them. No authority to appeal to, no statutory funding to release. And that changes everything.

There's no eligibility box to tick, so the only thing that matters is the quality of the assessment itself: the right diagnosis, and recommendations a teacher, SENCO or parent can actually act on.

We're expanding our clinical team and would like to hear from experienced assessors registered with the HCPC, AHPRA, HPCSA, PSI, a US State Board, or equivalent.If that describes you, or a colleague you'd recommend, the details are here: https://globaleducationtesting.com/for-educational-psychologists/