I'm Jenny Tebbitt, an consultant and specialist teacher with twenty five years of experience working with children with learning difficulties and neurodiversity. People often ask me what the difference between children who are underachieving and those who have learning difficulties is. The simple answer is that we now know students with learning differences and neurodiversity have underpinning cognitive weaknesses that are not present in other students. Our assessment system in schools today focuses largely on academic areas. It generally tells us where student achievement is sitting in relation to their chronological age, above it, at age, or below. Fortunately, much of our assessment can now also be diagnostically.

Used and tells us what a student's next steps in learning are. What it doesn't tell us is why students are where they are. In addition to our mainstream testing, we need to identify the underpinning cognitive weaknesses that are preventing a child from achieving. These underpinning weaknesses may relate to visual and auditory processing disorders, phonological weakness, short term and working memory difficulties, processing delays, or gross and fine motor skills. In addition, other weaknesses such as executive functioning, attention, and organisation difficulties can add to underpinning weaknesses. Our education system focuses on academic areas.

If we have a child who's underachieving in reading, writing, spelling, or maths, as teachers, we are taught to provide an academic solution. It might be with a different person or with a different program, but it remains based in reading, writing, spelling, or maths. What we now know is that unless we identify and address underpinning weaknesses, our children are going to remain students who are well below their chronological age. The fact that many of our learners have often had two or three different remedial programs and work with different specialists without accelerated achievement gains is actually evidence for this. In addition, we're renowned for having a long tail of underachievers in our education.

In New Zealand, and this is the reason that that underachievement and the long tail remains. Screening assessments are extremely useful in identifying underpinning weaknesses. Assessments done correctly can identify the characteristics of specific learning differences. They can also identify underpinning weaknesses. They point to clear next steps in learning for a child, and they can help determine whether further specialist assessment is needed. Currently, the cost of a screening assessment is less than a tenth of a full cognitive and achievement assessment, and it can be the light on a lighthouse for determining the direction of learning and teaching for that child.

More good news is that every teacher can be trained to undertake screening assessments that identify underpinning weaknesses. Students that are identified, diagnosed, and remediated before the age of eight are less costly and less difficult to remediate. In education, our next step after training teachers to identify underpinning weaknesses is to give training and teaching for underpinning weaknesses in mainstream classroom settings. Providing the right assessment and the right teaching is proven to accelerate achievement for at risk student groups. If you're a parent of an undiagnosed student, I encourage you to find an avenue and complete a screening assessment for your child.

If you're a teacher or in a leadership role, I encourage you to train to undertake and analyse screening assessments with a skilled trainer. Adjusting the way students are assessed and providing training for teachers and underpinning cognitive weaknesses will be the beacon of hope in education for the future. Our efforts to move to structured literacy to address phonemic and phonological weakness is the first example of this in a mainstream setting that we're seeing. I look forward to more of these changes and to working with everybody in the future to help facilitate those.