Bonas MacFarlane - Director, Charles Bonas, discusses academic assessments with Independent Psychologist and Educational Consultant - Desmond O'Connor

The Bonas MacFarlane Assessment is designed to evaluate your child’s academic strengths and weaknesses. Assessments take place either at the Bonas MacFarlane offices or at home. They can also be conducted through our online platform.

A Tailored Assessment

The assessment begins with a brief, informal conversation that follows a carefully constructed mode of enquiry, whilst remaining flexible and responsive. All areas of school life are covered including attitudes to subjects, future education, hobbies, ambitions and aspirations, anxiety or worries surrounding school and relationship to tutoring. The written assessments that follow take approximately two hours. The assessments test specific literacy and numeracy skills, whilst probing the student’s behaviour patterns, attention, distractibility, thinking methods, working memory and receptive/expressive language.

These assessments, which we always interpret alongside school and educational psychologist reports, enable our teams to see where a child stands academically compared with national and international averages. They help us to advise about school and university options, and provide our education team with the information required to prepare a learning programme that is effective, inspiring and suited to a child’s individual needs.

Assessment Tests

For the written assessment we use a wide range of tools:

• Oxford Young Learners Placement Test: – ideal for students aged 7 to 11 whose first language is not English.

• Cambridge English Placement Test: – for students whose first language is not English aged 11 to 16.

• Oxford Online Placement Test: – similar to Cambridge Test but for ages 15 to adults whose first language is not English.

• WRAT-4: – a wide-ranging aptitude test that consists of four Subtests that look at Word Reading, Sentence Comprehension, Spelling and Mathematics. The WRAT-4 produces scores on each Subtest that act as a guide to basic academic skills.

• York Assessment of Reading Comprehension: – a detailed set of tasks which produce standardised scores for accuracy, reading rate and comprehension. It also gives an Equivalent Reading Age.

• S. Chinn 15 Minute Maths Test: – suitable for children aged 7 to adults.

• S.Chinn Basic Operations: – for people with suspected Maths difficulties.

• S.Chinn Anxiety Maths Questionnaire: – a useful assessment of anxiety levels in relation to Maths and Maths lessons.

• S.Chinn Cognitive Method: – a set of mental maths questions, written questions and spatial tasks that looks at the child’s broad thinking approach and problem solving technique. and Maths lessons.

• Bonas MacFarlane English Papers.

• Bonas MacFarlane Guided Maths Conversations.

• Bonas MacFarlane Extension Maths Papers.

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