Psychology and assessment fees
These are a separate service from the ParkSyde Learning subscription, booked separately and never added to it. The subscription's own price is on the pricing page.
🧠 Formal assessments, done properly
Assessments here have always been administered by someone qualified to administer them. ParkSyde subcontracts a clinical psychologist for this work and continues to. From August 2026 that sits alongside a registered psychologist working directly with us — general registration with AHPRA, no area of practice endorsement.
We separate those two deliberately rather than writing “our psychologists”. “Clinical psychologist” is a protected title, it belongs to the person who holds it, and you should be able to check every word on this page against a real registration.
That subcontract is not a stopgap and never was. It is the same discipline Queensland state schools run on: an assessment is only valid when the qualified practitioner administers it and signs it off, and the registration of whoever verifies is checked rather than assumed. Our director spent 25 years inside that system — youth worker, teacher, guidance officer, deputy principal — and the part he learned there is the part most assessments never get: how to read the result, understand what it means, and turn it into something that works for a real child in a real week. We have kept both halves ever since, on purpose.
What “done properly” means here, in specifics you can hold us to: whoever administers an instrument holds the registration that instrument requires; the report says what the assessment found rather than what anyone hoped it would find; and you get a session to sit down and go through it, because a report nobody explains to you is a document, not an answer.
None of it is something you need. Most families never do, and your included Learning Start consultation is still the front door — it is also where you find out an assessment wouldn't tell you anything you don't already know. Nothing is sold to you before someone qualified says it is warranted. The reason any of it exists is narrow enough to say plainly: so a child gets taught the way they actually learn, by the person who knows them best.
| Sessions — private or NDIS | $250/hour |
|---|---|
| Cognitive assessment, packagedIntake, the cognitive assessment itself, scoring of adaptive behaviour and other screeners, the instrument fee, the written report, sending it to anyone you name, and a session to sit down and go through what it found. | $1,600 |
| Achievement testing, added to the aboveAdministration and scoring. Only where the cognitive results warrant it — see below. | $700–$900 |
| Achievement testing on its own | $1,500 |
| ADHD assessmentIntake, standardised screeners and information gathered from more than one setting, scoring, the report and a feedback session. Screeners are evidence, not a verdict — see below. | $1,100 |
| ADHD assessment, added to a cognitive assessmentLess, because the intake and the feedback session happen once. Attention and working-memory questions surface in a cognitive assessment constantly, so this is a common pairing. | +$600 |
| Autism assessment, under 12Intake, the ADOS-2 administered, report writing and a feedback session — the whole assessment, not an instrument sold on its own. Where the picture is complex a diagnosis needs more than one profession looking at it, and we say so before you book rather than after. | $1,950 |
| Autism assessment, 12 and overThe same, allowing for the longer developmental history an older child or teenager brings to it. | $2,250 |
| Cognitive, achievement and autism togetherPriced well under the three bought separately, because the intake and the feedback session happen once rather than three times. | $3,400–$3,900 |
When we will say no to a test you have offered to pay for
Achievement testing only happens where there is a significant gap between how your guest reasons and how they are performing. That gap is the thing the test can actually explain. Without it, the result tells you what you already know and costs you several hundred dollars to hear — so we will say that instead of taking the booking. You are welcome to disagree and go elsewhere; we would rather you knew our reasoning than assumed we were upselling.
A screener is not a diagnosis. Rating scales and questionnaires build a picture across settings and over time — they are evidence, not a verdict. Identifying ADHD rests on a full assessment: developmental history, real impact in more than one setting, and ruling other explanations in or out. We work to the Australian evidence-based clinical guideline for ADHD, we will tell you when the data does not support a conclusion, and we do not prescribe — medication sits with a paediatrician or psychiatrist. What we provide is the assessment and the documentation that lets them decide well, written to what was found rather than to order.
How we hold your place
When a place comes up we will offer it to you and then leave it a few days for you to come back with a time that suits. After that we keep it open for two more appointment turns. If we still have not heard from you we let it go to the next family, and you have simply left the park for now — no penalty, nothing written down against you, and the door open whenever you want to walk back through it. Life happens. Tell us and we will start again.
Fees are GST inclusive. There is no Medicare rebate for psychometric assessment — not from us, not from anyone, and we would rather say so here than let you find out at the counter. Private health may cover part of it under extras, but cover varies enormously between funds and between policies, and assessment is often treated differently from a consultation. Ring your fund before you commit to anything and ask what they will pay for in writing. We cannot find that out for you and we will not guess at it. We are not an NDIS registered provider. If you self-manage your plan or it is plan-managed, that makes no difference and you are welcome. If the NDIA manages your plan, it does — those plans can only be spent with registered providers, so we are not an option for you. Better you know that here than after booking.