Icould not help feeling some nerves. I had never taken part in any kind of psychometric testing, and I had no idea what to expect. But there I was, sitting at my laptop preparing - like thousands of apprentices across England - to take a test that is currently taking the sector by storm.

It is a 30-minute psychometric assessment, designed to be built into the initial evaluation of new apprentices. The test assesses whether a learner is neurodiverse. This term covers a range of neurological conditions, from ADHD and the autistic spectrum to dyslexia and dyspraxia. The results of the assessment flag up any needs a learner might have, identifying ways they could be supported to help them learn and boost their employability.

The assessment certainly was challenging, and would have been for anyone: testing the ability to memorise words and symbols, as well as information from passages of text, all using a keyboard and under time pressure.

But the implications are significant. Crucially, for colleges and providers, the assessment report can also be used as evidence to access learning support funding (LSF) from the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), worth £150 per month for each learner. Over the duration of an apprenticeship, which can last between 12 and 48 months, this can add up to as much as £7,200.

The creation of the neurodiversity assessment speaks to a major underlying issue when it comes to diversity in the apprenticeship programme. Last year, a research report by Emily Jones and Elizabeth Davies from the Learning and Work Institute found that in 2016-17, 10.3 per cent of individuals starting an apprenticeship had a declared learning difficulty and/or disability (LDD).

Although that proportion had increased slightly in each of the previous five years from a starting point of 7.7 per cent in 2011-12, progress in increasing the diversity of apprentices has been slow. Even the higher figure for 2016-17 “still only represents around half the total proportion of people with disabilities - almost one in five (19.5 per cent) of people aged 16-64 years in England”, the report notes.

Tapping into a need

Psychometric testing of any kind has always been controversial - not just in education - and education psychologists warn complex matters such as neurodiversity should not be over-simplified by a quick “diagnosis”. But there is a growing school of thought among experts in the sector that an initial cognitive assessment to ascertain whether an individual has any LDD requirements should not just be an option for some students - it should be an entitlement.

One company that has been turning heads with its assessments in the FE sector is CognAssist. It works to identify students who otherwise might never have been aware they could benefit from extra support. In the next 12 months, it expects to carry out 60,000 new starter assessments, leading to more than a quarter of a million learner interventions. It also expects to train 3,000 staff to use its assessments and process the results.

CognAssist has tapped into a need the sector has been aware of - to identify those apprentices that have additional support needs, and also to boost participation of those learners in the system - but has by and large been unable to tackle, due to financial constraints. Its initial assessments cost between £25 and £55 per learner - a fraction of the cost of getting an educational psychologist to do an evaluation, usually priced at £500-£800.

Users of the service report the proportion of learners with an identified need increased, on average, from 8 per cent to 24 per cent as a result of the assessment. Learners receive their assessment results immediately, and if a need is identified, an algorithm sets out a support plan with a range of resources, such as videos, self-assessment questions, blended learning opportunities, process checklists and scenario-based learning to allow the apprentice to adjust their way of working and help employers and college tutors to support them in doing so.

For chief executive Chris Quickfall, the concept was borne out of his own experience in the education system. It was only while he was studying mechanical engineering at Northumbria University that he was identified as having dyslexia. “I was a bit surprised,” he says. “I didn’t really understand what it was or what it meant, so I went to try and work that out. I went from a predicted 2:2 to a predicted first, just through using specific strategies. So I got really interested in that.”

He continues: “I started working with some neuroscientists. About 60 per cent of the people who are registered with a need at university are identified at university. One of the reasons for that is cost. So I had always thought that if you could put that price down…you were on to something special.”

The increase in attention on the subject can be traced back to May 2016 when Nick Boles and Justin Tomlinson, then ministers for skills and disabled people respectively, commissioned a taskforce chaired by another MP, Paul Maynard, to explore access to apprenticeships for those with learning disabilities.

It recommended a range of measures to increase participation from those with disabilities in apprenticeships. Among them, it suggested that the government should adjust the minimum standard of English and maths required for some LDD, for those who were able to meet the occupational standards but would struggle to achieve English and maths qualifications at the level normally required. In response to this report, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) created a special interest group on neurodiversity.

Three years on, chief executive Mark Dawe believes there is still a lot of unidentified need in the sector due to a lack of comprehensive knowledge of this field in further education.

“It goes unidentified because we don’t have a specialist looking at that,” he says. “[Fixing the problem] doesn’t actually need a lot of money.”

Another part of the problem has been that while additional learning support (ALS) has been available, providers haven’t always claimed it - particularly in cases where learners may have learning support needs not clearly related to an LDD.

As the Learning and Work Institute report on the issue points out: “Around a third of providers interviewed do not currently claim ALS funding for these apprentices because they do not know what evidence would be acceptable to the ESFA.”

Not a diagnosis

For this reason, Luke Beardon, a senior lecturer in autism at Sheffield Hallam University, believes an initial screening - like the one offered by CognAssist - could be beneficial for the sector.

“It seems to me that what they are differentiating is anyone who is situated cognitively outside of the demographic ‘norm’, however that is defined,” he explains. “I don’t have any problem with an initial screening to see if someone needs additional support. What it doesn’t do, and cannot do, is replace the specifics of what someone might then actually need as a result of that screening.”

An initial test, he points out, only takes an individual so far. “It simply tells us that the individual is neurodiverse - but I suspect that this process won’t tell us what exactly that person needs in terms of support. From an educational perspective, you still need the one-on-one engagement to identify specific need.

“Psychometric testing is not an exact science, but anything that helps us identify need is good. It is also worth noting that there are certain autistic individuals with high academic ability for whom such testing may not identify need at all, even though the person might benefit from specific types of support. My view is that this is a screening tool that might aid educationalists to further investigate additional support needs.”

West Suffolk College trains about 1,500 apprentices each year. Last year, just 10 of them self-identified as requiring additional learning support. This year, thanks to the CognAssist test, the college is aware of 180 apprentices in that position.

It brought in the neurodiversity assessment out of a desire to improve the experience for students, says Lisa Parish, head of quality improvement and innovation.

“It might not give us a diagnosis, but it gives us an indication,” she says. “It is a way of celebrating neurodiversity without putting a label on it.”

She says the college then offers a range of specialist support services to learners, and specialist support mentors carry out face-to-face interventions. “It is still quite early days, but the learners we are engaging with face-to-face are finding it beneficial.”

Employers have also welcomed the move, she stresses, as it sheds light on some of the challenges they have faced in keeping learners on track to improvement, such as an individual being repeatedly late for meetings.

Bradford College introduced neurodiversity assessments last year. “I wanted to look at the support we were providing for learning with additional learning needs and how we could grow our apprenticeship provision,” explains Asa Gordon, assistant principal for employer responsiveness. “Bradford is quite a deprived area. We wanted to provide a rounded offer.”

The tests were introduced for apprentices last year. They are being piloted with access students, with the college looking to roll them out to all learners. The results are given to the learner immediately, he explains, and the college builds them into its assessment of the learner, with progress officers providing ongoing support in the workplace.

“The assessment is great and the analysis you can provide to staff and apprentices is really helpful to their progression and in supporting the employer,” Gordon continues. “It is making sure they are staying on the programme, achieving and progressing. We are starting to see some success with functional skills in-year, and they are making progress from their starting point alongside learners who have not identified. So that shows the right level of support is there.”

‘Basic human right’

But while some providers are paying more attention to the needs of their apprentices, many more could benefit from embracing neurodiversity testing, Quickfall argues.

“There are a lot of learners out there who have a difficulty, but it is difficult for a tutor to find out what the right course is,” he says. “We already have the mechanisms to help them.”

He believes, the assessments could be adapted for primary-aged children to identify learning needs and ensure proper support is put in place. “We would like to drop down to about age seven, and we would like to think that in 10 years, it will be a basic human right.”

So what was it like to take the assessment? It’s certainly not easy: the results made me more aware of weaker areas in my ways of taking in information I had not seriously considered since leaving education.

One example of this was a passage of text that appeared written on the screen but was also read out - I have always struggled to take in information in English, my second language, when reading and listening at the same time, and so could feel myself panic and lose large chunks of what was supposed to be remembered immediately. I also wonder how I would have dealt with some parts of the assessment - especially those centred around language - had I been a native speaker of English.

The assessment report, which arrived immediately on completion of the test, identified no areas in which I might have required support, but its 11 pages offered useful guidance. My strengths, it says, sit in visual perception, executive function and numeracy in particular, and less so in non-verbal memory or visual information processing speed.

The report offers advice for teaching staff, too. If I was an apprentice and staff wanted to help me with my numeracy, they should “help Julia with planning using tools such as diaries or schedules and demonstrate practical tasks involving direction, position and movement. When working with patterns, give Julia clues to help them identify and predict them.”

If the need had been in visual perception, it recommends, for example, that “to support Julia’s needs in visual perception, avoid presenting too much visual information at once and supplement visual information with a verbal explanation. Encourage Julia to discuss what [she is] learning and give verbal cues yourself when teaching.”

I had been concerned that a test that is impossible to prepare for, is done at a computer and under time pressure would create stress and pressure for prospective apprentices - and it might for some. But for me, the assessment’s structure - clear instructions followed by a range of relatively fast-paced tasks - felt nothing like the brain-probing I had feared.

Julia Belgutay is deputy FE editor for Tes.

She tweets @JBelgutay

This article originally appeared in the 3 May 2019 issue under the headline “The new ‘normal’?”