Information for parents

If you would like to refer your child to the NDAU, you will first need to discuss this with their school, as the school will make the referral to us.

Following a referral by their school, your child will usually visit the unit for one morning and one afternoon assessment session, which last around two to three hours each. During the sessions, your child will complete assessments across a range of core skills, such as attention, memory, language and emotion recognition.

Assessments at NDAU usually take two sessions of between two and three hours, and your travel expenses will be paid (up to £25 per session).

Understanding our research

The NDAU is run by a group of scientists interested in understanding the social, emotional and behavioural problems experienced by young children, and in overcoming these difficulties where possible. To do this, we work with your child to measure different skills important for learning and behaviour, such as short-term memory and understanding emotions. The information that we collect about your child will be fed back to the school, who will then discuss it with you.

Aims of this study are to:

provide information that can be used by professionals to help shape the support that children might receive
build a picture from the research findings of the different abilities and difficulties that children have, which will help identify new methods for improving behaviour and learning.

Confidentiality and security

All research that involves children is looked at by an independent group of people called a Research Ethics Committee. This study has been considered carefully and approved by the School of Psychology Research Ethics Committee.

All personal information collected in the course of the study will be handled confidentially. All information is stored securely and in anonymised form that prevents non-authorised users and anyone from outside of the research team from linking it with any information that identifies the child or family. We comply with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 with regard to the collection, storage, processing and disclosure of personal information, and are committed to upholding the Act’s core Data Protection principles.

A video recording will be made of your child’s assessment sessions for research, safety and training purposes. In particular, the video may be used to demonstrate important aspects of children’s development to new researchers. This video recording will be identifiable only using a research identification number, so your child’s name will not be linked to the video. This video will be under the supervision of Professor van Goozen’s research team, and will not be passed onto unauthorised individuals.

More information can be found on our parent information sheet.

Withdrawing from the study

You and your child are free to withdraw from the study at any time, without giving any reason. This would not affect the standard of support that your child receives. We can delete all data collected up to your withdrawal at your request.