01 Apr Outsourced Educational Psychologist for International Schools in Shanghai
Shanghai gives an international school SENCO more local options than most Chinese cities, but more is not the same as usable. A local psychoeducational report arrives in Mandarin, normed against a Mandarin-speaking population and built for the Chinese state curriculum, so the SENCO is still translating and rebuilding it before Cambridge, the IB or the College Board will treat it as exam access evidence. And volume does not fix the core flaw: students in Shanghai’s international schools carry Mandarin or another home language alongside English, and a Mandarin-language assessment cannot separate a genuine learning difficulty from the effects of English being an additional language. Global Education Testing takes it off the SENCO, a full battery in English by an HCPC-registered educational psychologist against DSM-5-TR and ICD-11, a board-ready report tiered across exam and classroom access, and a debrief with the psychologist who ran it.
Local EdPsych Solutions for International Schools in Shanghai
Most international schools in Shanghai face the same problem. They have students who need a psychoeducational assessment, and no educational psychologist on staff (or locally) to do it in English.
The two usual answers both cost the school something. Employing an educational psychologist is expensive, hard to recruit for internationally, and underused in a school that needs a handful of assessments a term rather than a full-time post. Sending families away to find their own assessment is slower, produces reports of wildly varying quality, and leaves the school carrying the risk when a weak or foreign report will not support an exam-board application.
Global Education Testing Shanghai is the third option. We are the school’s educational psychology function, on demand, without the headcount. Our HCPC-registered educational psychologists have completed more than 3,000 psychoeducational assessments for international school students worldwide, covering dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, autism spectrum and the anxiety and executive function difficulties that travel with them.
A full diagnostic battery, a report your learning support team can use the day it arrives, and a dedicated point of contact who carries the process with your SENCO from referral to follow-up.
The assessment is conducted in English and the diagnostic report and of course written in English. In Shanghai, that is the whole point. Local psychoeducational assessment, where it is available at all, is usually delivered in the national language and normed against a national-language population, which does not serve a student taught and examined in English. Global Education Testing Shanghai assesses the student in the language they learn in, against the norms that fit them, and produces a report the school and the exam board can use without translation. Parental feedback can be given in any language the parents choose.
How it works in Shanghai
A single referral sets the process in motion. Each school and family in Shanghai receives a dedicated, secure documentation portal. The SENCO becomes the single point of contact, forwarding teacher input requests, while parents upload their information in parallel. Assessment takes place remotely, or in a quiet room at school or at home where preferred, and pre and post-assessment consultations are arranged around the SENCO, the parents, or both. Every report delivers targeted recommendations specific to the student’s complete diagnosis.
The portal is the part that matters most to a school. The student’s clinical information never lands in a teacher’s inbox, the data flow stays under the school’s control, and the SENCO holds a single thread rather than a scatter of emails.
Support for your SENCO after diagnosis
Ask a SENCO what goes wrong with outside assessments and you tend to hear the same thing. A report comes back, it is thirty pages of scores and percentiles, and it tells the school almost nothing about what to actually do. The diagnosis is in there somewhere, but the guidance is thin, generic, or missing, and the SENCO is left to work out the classroom implications alone. The assessment got done. The support did not.
That is the gap Global Education Testing Shanghai is built to close, and it is why the work does not end when the report lands.
Every report finishes with recommendations tiered across the exam room, the classroom, intervention and the family, written as specific actions rather than generic advice, so the SENCO opens it and already knows what changes for this student. Then we talk them through it. A post-report consultation walks the SENCO through the findings in plain language, explains what each recommendation means in practice, and helps translate the clinical conclusions into the school’s own support plan.
Where the report feeds an access arrangements application, we walk the SENCO and the Exams Officer through exactly what the board needs and how the report supplies it. Before the assessment we do the same. Your SENCO has a single named contact, not a ticket queue. We help frame the referral question, advise whether a full or focused assessment fits the case, tell the SENCO precisely what teacher input we need, and chase the parent-side uploads ourselves through the portal so nobody is left chasing documents.
For a SENCO who is not a psychologist, and many in international schools are not, this is the whole difference. A report that names a diagnosis is easy to get. A report that tells your school what to do about it, from someone who will then sit with your SENCO and make sure it is understood, is what we deliver. The assessment is ours to run. The student is theirs to support. We make the handover between those two complete.
We can of course complete the documentation required on any access arrangements application, including the Form-8 for JCQ.
Our Comprehensive Assessment
Our assessment for Shanghai is a layered battery of gold-standard instruments, administered in English by an HCPC-registered educational psychologist. It is built to do the one thing a single screener cannot, which is to separate difficulties that look identical on the surface.
The cognitive baseline comes from the WISC-V for students under 18 or the WAIS-V for those 18 and over. Academic attainment is measured against the WIAT. The CTOPP-2 isolates the phonological processing that sits underneath dyslexia. The SNAP-IV-26, the Conners and Executive Skills self-reports and the MOXO Continuous Performance Test cover attention and executive function. The Taylor Complex Figure Test examines planning and visual working memory, the DISCO rules an autism profile in or out, and the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank captures the emotional impact that years of undiagnosed difficulty leave behind.
This is what allows a single assessment to distinguish dyslexia from a more general reading delay, ADHD from anxiety or from the effects of a learning difficulty masking underneath it, dyscalculia from a maths-specific attainment gap, and dysgraphia or a developmental language difficulty from the surface picture they present as. The instruments are the inputs. The diagnosis is the judgement that integrates them.
The report runs to twenty or more pages, sets its conclusions and diagnosis against DSM-5-TR and ICD-11, and finishes with recommendations tiered across the exam hall, classroom, intervention and the family.
The most common complaint an International School SENCO has about an outside report is that it delivers scores and no guidance, a diagnosis with no instructions. This report is the opposite. It is written to be acted on, by a teaching team, the week it arrives.
Helping International Schools in Shanghai differentiate between EAL issues and Learning Difficulties
This is the single hardest judgement in an international school in Shanghai, and it is the one a screener cannot make.
Students in international schools are rarely monolingual English speakers. Many carry a home language that is their true first language, the national language as a second, and English as the language of instruction. A student operating across three or four languages and assessed academically in English can present exactly like a student with dyslexia or a language difficulty: slow reading, weak written output, trouble with comprehension under time pressure. To an untrained eye, and to a single-test screener, the two are indistinguishable.
They are not the same thing, and getting the this wrong is costly in both directions. Misread a genuine learning difficulty as English language acquisition and the student loses years of intervention. Misread normal-range English acquisition as a learning difficulty and a student carries a clinical diagnosis they do not have.
The difference lives in the cognitive layer, which is why the full battery exists. A student whose difficulty is purely about acquiring English will show intact phonological processing, age-appropriate working memory, and a cognitive profile without the dissociation that marks a specific learning difficulty.
A student with a genuine difficulty shows the underlying pattern regardless of which language they are tested in, and it is present in the home language too when the family is asked properly.
Separating those two is a clinical judgement, made in English by an HCPC-registered educational psychologist, and it is the reason the school gets a diagnosis it can rely on rather than a guess.
Exam access arrangements for Shanghai students
For a student at an international school in Shanghai sitting an exam series, the report is the evidence base for the access arrangements application, and it arrives already structured for the board the student sits under.
Pearson Edexcel iGCSE and A-Level, through a Form 8 the SENCO submits ahead of the series. Cambridge International, through the centre’s framework. The International Baccalaureate, through its Inclusive Assessment Arrangements policy, applied for by the school’s IB Coordinator. The College Board SAT and AP, through the SSD process. The access arrangements section is written against the framework the school’s board actually applies, so the SENCO can submit it directly rather than translate or supplement it.
The same report also supports access arrangements for the university entrance and admissions tests that students in Shanghai sit on the way to a place, where the qualifying evidence requirements are just as strict. These include the medical and health admissions tests (UCAT, BMAT, GAMSAT, ISAT and the MCAT), the law admissions tests (LNAT and the LSAT), the Oxford and Cambridge subject tests (the MAT, STEP, TMUA, PAT, ENGAA, NSAA, TSA, HAT and ELAT), and the graduate tests (the GRE and GMAT).
A student who is granted extra time at iGCSE and A-Level does not automatically carry it into these, each has its own evidence process, and the report is written to serve as the documentation each one requires.
In-school support
The application is not where the report’s usefulness ends. The findings translate directly into the school’s own support documentation, whether that is an Individual Learning Plan, a Student Support Plan or the local equivalent, with specific classroom strategies and review milestones. The SENCO uses the report to brief subject teachers on the student’s profile and the strategies that work for them. This is where a full diagnostic report earns its place over a screener: the screener gives the teaching team nothing to act on, and the report gives them a plan.
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.