Formal diagnosis stays with independent clinicians we neither own nor pay. That is the first of our four rules, and it means we can write this page straight.
Who diagnoses what
- Autism — usually a developmental paediatrician, a child psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist, frequently working as a multidisciplinary team with a speech and language therapist.
- ADHD — a paediatrician, child psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, drawing on structured information from home and school. An assessment based only on what happens in a clinic room is missing half the picture by design.
- Dyslexia and other specific learning differences — an educational psychologist. This is also the report an exam board will eventually want for access arrangements.
- Speech, language and communication — a speech and language therapist, who can assess and treat without any diagnostic label being involved.
- Sensory and motor — an occupational therapist, who produces a sensory profile rather than a diagnosis.
Before any of it: get hearing checked. It is quick, it is cheap, and intermittent hearing loss from repeated ear infections mimics a great deal of what gets assessed at far greater expense. It is the single most cost-effective appointment on this page.
What to ask when you book
- Who exactly will see my child, and what is their discipline?
- How many sessions, and does it include observation outside the clinic?
- Will you gather information from the school, and how?
- What does the written report include, and when do we get it?
- Is there a feedback session where someone talks us through it?
- Total cost, including the report?
The third matters more than it sounds. A diagnostic picture built without any input from where your child spends six hours a day is thinner than it should be, and school input is the part most often skipped for time.
The conflict worth checking
Ask whether the clinic that diagnoses your child also sells the therapy that follows. It is an extremely common arrangement in this market and it is not automatically wrong — but the people deciding what your child needs should ideally not be the people who profit from the answer.
If they are the same organisation, ask what proportion of the children they assess do not go on to become their clients. Watch how the question lands. That reaction is data.
What you can start without a label
This is the part most families are not told, and it can save a year.
Speech therapy, occupational therapy, classroom adjustments, parent coaching and structured literacy teaching do not require a diagnosis. They are decided by what your child can and cannot do — which is a different question from what they have, and a more immediately useful one.
A functional assessment answers that question and can be done now, while a diagnostic appointment is months away. It also gives the school something concrete to act on, which a diagnosis on its own frequently does not.
When a diagnosis is genuinely worth pursuing
- The picture is unclear and a specialist opinion would change what is being taught
- A school requires it before allocating support
- It opens insurance cover for therapy you would otherwise fund entirely
- Exam access arrangements will eventually be needed
- Your child is old enough to want an explanation for their own experience
The last one is not a small thing. For a lot of young people the label is the first time anything has made sense, and that has value entirely separate from what it unlocks administratively.