Profiling childhood disability: the reliability of the educational needs questionnaire

The Educational Needs Questionnaire (ENQ) is used by the Victorian Departme nt of Education (Australia) to allocate resources to support children with disabilities at school. It directly affects the programs and supports that the children and their families can access. This paper reports on the inter observer reliability of the ENQ. It was applied to over 70 school age chil dren by their parents and two therapist respondents. The results indicate t hat six of the subsets are reliable when evaluated by therapists and parent s. Three of the subsets did not achieve the necessary levels of agreement a mongst therapists or between therapists and parents. The ENQ's total raw sc ore demonstrated strong reliability (r(s) = 0.92, P > 0.0001) and agreement (coefficient of determination = 0.85, P > 0.0001) between therapists, mode rate reliability (r(s) = 0.51, P > 0.0001) between therapists and parents a nd less than satisfactory agreement between therapists and parents (coeffic ient of determination = 0.26, P > 0.0001). (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. A ll rights reserved.