02 Sep Dyslexia Assessment Vicenza
For families inside Vicenza’s international school system, getting a dyslexia diagnosis the school can actually use is more complicated than it should be. The Italian DSA route runs on Italian language testing and produces paperwork built for the Italian state system, but not for International school curricula.
The iGCSE and A-Level exam boards don’t accept an Italian DSA Psychoeducational assessmet, neither does IB or the United States College Board. This means even if you get a Italian diagnosis, the risk is that the specific exam accommodations that help such as extra time in exams, use of a laptop, rest breaks might not be granted to the Dyslexic student.
The Italian epidemiological literature, including data published by Associazione Italiana Dislessia, puts dyslexia prevalence at around 3 to 5 per cent of school-age students. Applied across the international school population in Vicenza, that is hundreds of students at any given time whose academic profile is being shaped by an underlying, and often undiagnosed, specific learning difficulty.
Most parents searching for a dyslexia assessment in Vicenza are not at the start of that story. They are already most of the way through it. The teacher has flagged something, the student is frustrated, the homework battles are getting longer, and the family wants to know what is actually going on, and what to do about it.
Global Education Testing Vicenza
This is the gap Global Education Testing Vicenza closes. We are a private psychoeducational assessment service staffed by HCPC registered educational psychologists, working with international school families across the city and producing the document the school actually needs.
In Vicenza, our psychoeducational evaluations and dyslexia assessments are conducted in English, the report is written in English, and the clinical formulation explains, in plain language, why a student is struggling, and what to do about it.
The recommendations are tiered across exam hall, classroom, intervention, family and student. Each report is written for the specific exam board the student is studying under, because the evidence frameworks are not interchangeable.
A College Board SSD submission for the SAT does not ask for what a Pearson access arrangements application asks for, and neither matches the documentation the IB requires for Inclusive Assessment Arrangements on the Diploma Programme.
Global Education Testing Vicenza writes the access arrangements section against the framework the student’s board actually applies, so the SENCO can submit it directly to Pearson Edexcel, Cambridge International, the International Baccalaureate or the College Board without additional supporting documentation.
The assessment fee for families in Vicenza is EUR 2,750, inclusive of the full clinical battery, the formulation and report, the recommendations, and the post-report feedback session with the family. The whole assessment can be done remotely in Vicenza using our HIPAA & GDPR compliant online platform with secure video link.
Global Education Testing Vicenza is a private provider and we do not accept insurance. Our clients in Vicenza choose us because we provide immediate access to highly qualified HCPC-registered educational psychologists, and because our reports are recognised internationally by schools, examination boards, and universities.
For a family in Vicenza whose student is approaching an iGCSE, A-Level, IB or SAT series with a learning difficulty that has not yet been formally diagnosed, the calendar is usually the most important variable. The assessment runs to the family’s timeline, not to a public system queue. The whole process takes less than 21-days from start to finish.
Our Dyslexia Assessment
Our comprehensive dyslexia assessment for Vicenza’s International School students is built from a layered battery, consisting of World Class Gold-Standard standarized tests, administered by HCPC registered specialist Educational Psychologists.
Cognitive baseline. A full administration of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC-V) for students under 18, or the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fifth Edition (WAIS-V) for older students. This produces a Full Scale IQ and five Index scores: Verbal Comprehension, Visual Spatial, Fluid Reasoning, Working Memory and Processing Speed. The pattern across those indices is the cognitive signature on which a dyslexia diagnosis stands or falls.
Academic attainment. The Wechsler Individual Achievement Test, covering single-word reading, reading comprehension, reading fluency, spelling, written expression and the relevant maths subtests. WIAT is the standard against which the school’s actual concerns are quantified.
Phonological processing. The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, Second Edition (CTOPP-2). Phonological awareness, phonological memory and rapid automatised naming. CTOPP-2 deficits are the processing-level fingerprint of dyslexia, distinct from how the difficulty looks at the performance level.
Visual-spatial and visual memory. The Taylor Complex Figure Test, to differentiate a primarily visual-processing difficulty from dyslexia and to identify students whose visual memory is supporting or compensating.
Attention and executive function. The SNAP-IV and the Conners Self-Report Scales for ADHD screening, the Executive Skills Self-Report, and the MOXO Continuous Performance Test are used where ADHD is suspected alongside Dyslexia as one cannot be properly diagnosed without ruling on the other.
Emotional context. The Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank, to capture the secondary emotional impact of years of undiagnosed reading difficulty, which is almost always present by the time a student reaches assessment.
The report produced from this battery runs to thirty or more pages, sets out diagnostic conclusions against DSM-5-TR and ICD-11, and finishes with the specific accommodations recommended for the exam board the international school student is sitting under.
Working with Vicenza’s international schools
Global Education Testing Vicenza has produced assessments for students at every major international school in Vicenza, including:
- International School of Vicenza
- Vicenza International School
- H-FARM International School Vicenza Campus
- British School of Vicenza
- International School of Veneto
- Scuola Internazionale Vicenza
- European School Vicenza
- Vicenza Bilingual School
- Cambridge International School Vicenza
- International Academy Vicenza
The work covers the full age range these schools cater for, from primary identification cases where the question is whether what the teacher is seeing is dyslexia or English language acquisition, through to Year 11 and Year 13 students approaching iGCSE, A-Level, IB Diploma and SAT examinations where the report has to land in time for the access arrangements deadline.
Reports are written so the SENCO, the Inclusion Coordinator or the Head of Learning Support at the receiving school can use them directly. The clinical formulation is in plain English. The recommendations are tiered by subject and by setting. The access arrangements section is structured against the specific evidence framework the school’s exam board requires, so the application is built on a document the SENCO does not have to translate or supplement.
From report to access arrangements
For a student at any of the schools listed above and the wider Vicenza area, the diagnostic report is the document that opens the access arrangements process. What that process produces depends on which exam board the student is sitting under, and the differences matter.
Pearson Edexcel iGCSE and A-Level. Access arrangements are handled through a Form 8 (the JCQ-aligned standard Pearson applies for international centres) which the SENCO at your Vicenza international school submits ahead of the exam series. The diagnostic report provides the evidence base, and the arrangements available include 25-50 per cent extra time, supervised rest breaks, a separate room, a reader, a computer reader, a scribe, a word processor, and a prompter where attentional involvement is documented. The arrangements apply to the formal examinations and to the controlled assessments where Pearson runs them.
Cambridge International iGCSE, AS and A-Level. Cambridge runs its own access arrangements framework, applied for through the centre’s Exams Officer in coordination with the SENCO via the Cambridge International Direct portal. Cambridge accepts diagnostic reports that meet the equivalent JCQ-aligned standard. The arrangements track Pearson closely: extra time, rest breaks, a separate room, reader and scribe support, modified papers where applicable, and use of a laptop.
International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. The IB operates its own Inclusive Assessment Arrangements policy, applied for centrally by the school’s IB Coordinator. The IB will grant up to 50 per cent additional time for written examinations on the basis of a qualifying diagnostic report, alongside reading support, scribing, prompting, modified question papers, breaks, and access to assistive technology including text-to-speech and speech-to-text software. The IB framework also covers internal assessment, extended essay and Theory of Knowledge components where the documented difficulty applies.
College Board SAT. Accommodations for the SAT are approved through the College Board’s SSD process. The diagnostic report is the central piece of evidence. Approved accommodations include extended time (typically 50 per cent or 100 per cent depending on the profile), extra breaks, a small-group or separate room setting, a reader, a scribe, and assistive technology. The same approval also extends to AP examinations.
The work does not stop at the application. What sits underneath access arrangements in any well-functioning international school is a parallel set of in-school provisions that the diagnostic report should also be informing.
Individual Learning Plans and equivalents. Most international schools in Vicenza operate some version of an Individual Learning Plan, ILP, Student Support Plan or IB-aligned Learner Profile addendum. The diagnostic report feeds directly into this document, translating the cognitive and attainment findings into specific classroom accommodations, teaching strategies, and review milestones across the academic year.
Classroom accommodations. These are the day-to-day adjustments that turn the diagnosis into something the student actually experiences differently: front-of-class seating, instructions given in writing as well as orally, reduced reading load where comprehension rather than knowledge is being tested, extended time on internal class assessments, use of a laptop in lessons, and access to text-to-speech software for reading-heavy subjects.
Specialist intervention. In schools with a developed learning support department, the diagnostic report supports a structured literacy intervention, usually delivered one-to-one or in a small group, using an evidence-based programme such as a structured phonics approach or a multisensory literacy programme. The cadence is typically two to four sessions per week over a sustained period.
Subject teacher briefing. A diagnostic report at an international school is also a working document for the teaching team. The SENCO uses it to brief subject teachers on the student’s profile, on what to expect, and on the specific strategies the report recommends for that subject. This is where the difference between a generic screener and a full diagnostic assessment becomes visible: the screener does not give the subject teacher anything to act on. The full report does.
Parent partnership and review. The report sits at the centre of the conversation between school and family. It is the basis on which the school and the parents agree what is being put in place, who is doing what, and how progress will be measured. Most international schools in Vicenza review this at least termly.
Global Education Testing Vicenzaproduces assessments to exactly that standard for international school families in Vicenza, with HCPC-registered educational psychologists and reports written to meet Pearson Edexcel, Cambridge International, IB and College Board requirements directly, and structured so the SENCO can use them as the working document the school’s learning support function actually needs.
Psychoeducational diagnostic reports from Global Education Testing Vicenza are also accepted by universities worldwide, including those with the most selective entry requirements and specialized entrance examinations including:
- MCAT – Medical College Admission Test
- LSAT – Law School Admission Test
- GAMSAT – Medical School Admissions Test
- ISAT – International Student Admissions
- GRE – Graduate Record Examination
- GMAT – Graduate Management Admission
- MAT – Oxford Mathematics
- STEP – Cambridge Mathematics
- TMUA – Math for University Admission
- PAT – Oxford Physics
- ENGAA – Cambridge Engineering
- NSAA – Cambridge Natural Science
- TSA – Oxford, Cambridge, UCL
- BMAT – Medical schools
- UCAT – Medical & dental schools
- LNAT – Law schools
- HAT – Oxford History
- ELAT – Oxford English
Why the Italian DSA route is not built for an English curriculum student
Italy has a developed dyslexia framework. Legge 170/2010 recognises Specific Learning Disorders as a protected category, and diagnoses are issued through the local ASL or a regionally accredited private centre. This pathway serves Italian students in the Italian state system. It is not built for a student at any of the international schools in Vicenza. The testing is in Italian, calibrated against an Italian-speaking population. The output is structured around the Piano Didattico Personalizzato, an internal Italian school document.
Unlike the Global Education Testing dyslexia assessment, a locally sourced DSA italian report does not map onto the JCQ-aligned evidence Pearson Edexcel and Cambridge International require for iGCSE and A-Level, the Inclusive Assessment Arrangements documentation the IB requires for the Diploma Programme, or the SSD documentation the College Board requires for the SAT.
The College Board mismatch is particularly stark. The College Board requires a diagnosis referenced against DSM-5-TR and ICD-11, using national norms, and an explicit rationale connecting the diagnosis to each specific accommodation requested on the SAT.
The Italian DSA pathway produces a diagnosis against the Italian Consensus Conference framework, a PDP built around Italian classroom support rather than a comprehensive psychoeducational report, and recommendations framed against the Italian school environment rather than a standardised English-language test. Waiting times often run beyond the windows a school operates against in any case.
EAL vs Dyslexia, and why this is important in Vicenza
The students sitting in Vicenza’s international schools are rarely monolingual English speakers. They live in Vicenza, where Italian is the ambient language of streets, friends, shops and signage. They are taught in English, often by teachers who are themselves not first-language English speakers. Many of them carry a third language at home, which is the actual L1, with Italian as L2 and English as L3 of instruction. A typical international student in Vicenza could be operating across three or four linguistic environments and is being assessed academically in English.
The reading and writing profile that produces can look indistinguishable from dyslexia to an untrained observer. Slow reading, spelling errors, weak written output, difficulty with comprehension tasks under time pressure.
A great many students get referred for a dyslexia assessment in Vicenza on exactly that basis. The single most important clinical judgement an educational psychologist makes in this city is whether the picture is a Specific Learning Disorder in reading or a normal-range stage of English language acquisition presenting as a reading difficulty because the instructional language is not the student’s strongest one.
The difference sits beneath the surface, in the cognitive profile, and it is the reason a full battery exists rather than a single test. An international school student in Vicenza whose difficulty is purely EAL will show intact phonological processing on CTOPP-2, age-appropriate working memory, and a WISC-V profile that does not display the characteristic dyslexic dissociation between verbal reasoning strengths and processing speed weaknesses.
Their attainment lags in surface measures of reading and writing but the underlying machinery is intact. A student with genuine dyslexia shows the deficit pattern regardless of language.
Phonological awareness and rapid automatised naming are impaired on CTOPP-2. Working memory and processing speed sit below the verbal and reasoning indices on the WISC-V. The difficulty is present in the home language too if the family is asked properly. Family history flags. The trajectory does not improve simply with more exposure to English.
This is a call Vicenza’s DSA pathway cannot make for an English curriculum student, because the testing it uses is in Italian and cannot separate Italian-language ability from English-language acquisition from underlying cognitive processing in English.
It is also a judgement a screener cannot make, because a screener tests surface attainment and the answer lives in the cognitive layer underneath. Getting this judgement wrong in one direction means a dyslexic student loses years of intervention. Getting it wrong in the other means an EAL learner is given a clinical diagnosis they do not have. The full battery, conducted in English by an HCPC-registered educational psychologist, exists to make that diagnosis properly.
Alexander Bentley-Sutherland is the CEO of Global Education Testing, the leading provider of Learning Development Testing tailored specifically for the International and Private School community worldwide.