Which Child Is In Front of You?
Assessment, intake and formulation with children and adolescents
Two parents can walk in on the same morning and say the same thing - “my child is being bullied,” or “she won’t go to school,” or “he’s so angry lately” - about two entirely different children. Nothing in the referral tells you which one you have. This course is about finding out.
Get instant access - $220 AUD See what’s covered“Method follows formulation” only works if the formulation is good enough to choose with. A thin picture chooses vaguely.
Assessment is not the preliminary.
It is the foundation.
A great deal of what gets called assessment in child work is a symptom checklist with a developmental history stapled to the front. It produces a description, and a description will sit equally comfortably in front of any of six different treatment plans.
The first job of an assessment is not diagnosis. It is triage - working out which of several very different children is actually in front of you. An ordinary social wobble and the fingerprint of persistent victimisation arrive in the same sentence, and if you treat the second child like the first you confirm the thing he already suspects: that adults do not see it, and there is no point saying anything again.
This session takes the parent interview, the child interview and the adolescent interview as three genuinely different conversations, because they are. It covers the functional analysis, which is the most underused skill in generalist child work. And it finishes by assembling everything into a five-part formulation that tells you what to do on Monday, and in what order.
Isabel Fraser
Isabel Fraser is a Senior Clinical Psychologist with the Clinical Psychology Resource Centre. She is a Psychology Board of Australia Board-Approved Supervisor, and works with children, adolescents and their families, and trains and supervises the clinicians who do the same.
Every clinical example in this webinar is a de-identified composite - drawn from many children and families over many years, with names and details changed, so that no child described is identifiable.
Six modules, and a self-directed practicum
Six composite cases run through the session, including two children who arrived in the same week with near-identical referral letters and entirely different engines underneath.
Which child is in front of you
Triage before diagnosis, and what a finished assessment actually has to produce.
- The same words, two different children
- The picture, the function, what hides, what helps
- Looking actively for what does not announce itself
The parent interview
The timeline, the development and the settings the child cannot report on.
- Setting the frame: purpose, confidentiality and its limits
- Symptoms and impairment - the half that gets skipped
- Development, medical history, family context, school
The child interview, under 12
Questions built for the equipment a child actually has.
- The warm-up that is not small talk
- “If your family were animals” and why metaphor works
- Feelings, worries, anger, dreams - and asking about safety
The adolescent interview
They did not book this appointment, and they know it.
- Confidentiality, said properly, including the exceptions
- Engagement before content or you get compliance, not disclosure
- The systematic sweep; substances, risk, and reasons to stay
Function, measures and disagreement
One episode is a clue. A pattern is an assessment.
- Four functions: escape, obtain, attention, settle
- Choosing measures by the question, not by habit
- Why informant disagreement is very often the finding
Building the five Ps
Perpetuating names the target. Protective names the resource.
- Assembling a formulation that narrows
- How two columns do the choosing
- Handing it back to the family in their own words
Self-directed Practice Studio
Thirty minutes after the sign-off, on one of your own real cases.
- Build all five Ps · name the function · find the gap
- Test whether the formulation actually narrows
- Write the one sentence you would say to the family
The referral describes the behaviour. Only the assessment finds the engine underneath it.
Built for generalist practice
Provisional psychologists & registrars
Carrying real cases while still described as in training, and wanting a first-session structure you can rely on.
Psychologists & counsellors
Seeing children and adolescents in generalist practice, with limited sessions and no assessment phase to spare.
Social workers & occupational therapists
Working with children and families, and wanting a shared formulation language across a team.
Experienced clinicians
With a case where something still does not add up, and a suspicion the formulation is where it went wrong.
What this is not
This is skills-informed professional development for generalist practice. It is not training or certification in any named assessment instrument, and it does not qualify you to administer one. Formal diagnostic, cognitive, educational and autism assessments are distinct exercises requiring specific training and specific tools - recognising when a child needs one is covered here; conducting one is not. Nothing in this webinar replaces supervision.
By the end of the session
- Explain why assessment is triage first, and diagnosis second
- Conduct a developmentally informed, multi-informant intake across parent, child and adolescent
- Run a functional analysis of a presenting behaviour and name what it is achieving
- Select validated measures by the clinical question rather than by habit
- Interpret informant disagreement as data rather than as noise
- Assemble a five-part formulation that names a target and a resource
2.5 CPD hours, with a certificate of completion
The 2.5 hours are made up of 2 hours of recorded content and a 30-minute self-directed Practice Studio that follows the sign-off. A certificate of completion is issued on finishing the recording, and states the split. Self-directed and peer-consultation activities are recorded differently by different registration and membership bodies, so please check your own requirements and record your hours accordingly.
Named, not taught
Several validated measures are named and discussed in this webinar so that you can choose between them intelligently. Every one of them carries its own qualification level, administration and scoring requirements, age ranges and local norms and those change.
Hearing an instrument named here is not training in it. Confirm the current requirements yourself, and use and interpret any measure within your own training and scope.
Two ways to keep going, and one for new graduates
Assessment is a skill that improves through being watched. You can learn the questions from a recording; timing, and knowing when to follow something and when to leave it, tends to need another clinician looking at your actual work.
Ongoing Supervision & Case-Consultation Group
A small, fortnightly 90-minute group led by Isabel Fraser, a Psychology Board of Australia Board-Approved Supervisor. Six sessions a quarter, open across the full CPRC programme.
- Bring the assessment where something still does not add up
- Group capped at 15 · billed quarterly · no lock-in
- Complements your existing formal supervision - it does not replace it
New Graduate Supervision Group
Weekly, one hour, for twelve weeks. A closed group - maximum ten, the same ten from start to finish - so you are not explaining your caseload to a new room each week.
- Weekly means days, not fortnights, when a first session throws up something frightening
- Attendance and session records provided for your supervision logbook
- Supplements - never replaces - the individual supervision your pathway requires
Certified Practitioner - CPRC Integrative Model
One credential across parents, children and teenagers, under a single formulation-led method. Three pathways in, twelve months of supervised practice on your own caseload, and a competency assessment signed off by a Board-Approved Supervisor.
- A structured, supervised pathway - not a single course
- Your name on the CPRC register on completion
- A CPRC professional-development credential - not an AHPRA endorsement, specialist title or additional registration
Which Child Is In Front of You
- 2 hours of on-demand recording, watch in your own time
- Certificate of completion for your CPD records
- Full slide handout, with the APA 7th reference list
- Self-directed 30-minute Practice Studio after the sign-off
- Six de-identified composite cases worked through in full
Group registrations of three or more: contact us for a discount code. Provisional psychologist and student rates available on request - email [email protected]