How did we look at the results?
We looked at how the children were doing in several ways.
Firstly we identified those children who had disabilities and divided those into a “Severe” category and an “Other disability” category. This was because we thought that children with severe disability would still have severe problems later on whereas we couldn’t be sure whether the other group would. In the severe category we classified children with cerebral palsy who were not likely to be mobile, children whose development was very behind what we would have expected and children with very severe hearing and sight problems.
Secondly we scored the developmental progress of each child using an up to date assessment (Bayley Scales). This gave us two scores for mental and motor development. Although the scores look like an IQ score (a score of 100 is the average in the population) they are simply a description of how well the child’s development has gone to date and are only moderately predictive (we think) of later IQ and ability at school.
Thirdly, we looked at each child’s behaviour from the eyes of our doctor and then from your eyes. We know these sort of forms are difficult and time-consuming to fill in, but thank you again for your help. We also asked for some family details and how you were all feeling. This information we haven’t analysed yet as we are working hard to get the information on the children out but we should have done this later this year. So... Read More>