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This paper is an investigation into referral and assessment for individual psychotherapy in a day special school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. It was written principally for the teachers who work in such schools, who have the problem of choosing whom to refer out of all their needy charges, without the benefit of a therapist's training and experience in how to make this choice. It also includes some exploration of the particular difficulties that beset the therapist in such a setting over the issue of assessment. As a result of the audience for whom it was originally prepared, there is no actual clinical material included, and there is a deliberate avoidance of diagnostic jargon beyond the level with which the school staff-group were likely to be familiar. The paper falls into two distinct parts. The first consists of a discussion of the particular nature of the assessment process in a school setting. The second is a survey of all the children referred for therapy in one school during the two and a half years of my employment there, both those who sustained their therapy and those who did not, in an attempt to clarify the most important issues in referring and assessing these children in this setting. This survey is deliberately comprehensive, with no child omitted, so as to represent accurately the range of cases a school therapist is likely to encounter and the referral issues they raise.
First, let us look at the ways in which assessment in a school differs from assessment in a clinic or a hospital. It might be thought that one would still be making the same sort of judgements about a child when assessing them wherever one practises, and that the setting is of little importance. In what ways would the process differ just because one is operating in a school? Despite the fact that the aim of the exercise is ultimately the same wherever one is working, in my experience the difference in setting exerts a v