An IQ test for your child: the school psychology service or a private practice?

Most parents do not arrive at this subject out of curiosity. It starts with a remark from the class teacher, a child who is bored in lessons, or one who is not keeping up despite real effort. Then comes the question of whether to have it looked at, and immediately after it the question of where and at what price.

Two things first, because they shape the rest of this article. First: the cantonal school psychology services assess pupils free of charge. That is the standard route, and hardly anyone who has moved to Switzerland knows it exists. Second: our own test is built for adults and is not suitable for children. That is why we do not advertise it on this page.

Our own position, right at the start

Kognita is a short online test for adults. It compares a result with a single reference distribution that is not separated by age. That is exactly the problem with children: how many tasks a child solves depends heavily on how old the child is. An instrument for children therefore needs comparison values separated by age, often in steps of a few months.

A result from our test would not simply be a little too low or a little too high for a child. It would be a value without a reference quantity, and therefore without meaning. We write that here even though it earns this page no test runs, and we have deliberately placed no link to our test on this page.

If you have questions about how your child is getting on, the school psychology service of your canton is the right place to start.

The Schulpsychologischer Dienst: responsible and free of charge

Here is the piece of information that is worth the whole article. In Switzerland education is a cantonal matter. There are 26 cantons, and each one runs its own schools and its own support services. There is no national school system and no national authority to call. What applies to your child depends on where you live.

Every canton runs a Schulpsychologischer Dienst, a school psychology service, in some places organised centrally for the canton and in others regionally by district. For pupils the assessment is free of charge. Not subsidised, not partly reimbursed: free. Families who have moved here from the United Kingdom, the United States, India or the EU frequently pay a private practice for something the canton would have done at no cost, simply because nobody told them the service was there.

The remit is aimed at school related questions: how learning is going, and what follows from that for starting school, for placement or for additional support.

How a family actually reaches it

The route in differs from canton to canton, and there are only two variants.

• Through the school. This is the normal way. You raise your observation with the class teacher, who discusses it with the school management, and the school makes the referral to the service. In most cantons the school holds the referral right, so this is not a detour but the proper door.
• Directly. In several cantons parents may contact the service themselves, without going through the school first.

One phone call to the service in your canton establishes which of the two applies, and that call is the cheapest step available in this whole matter. You do not need a letter, a referral note from a doctor or an appointment beforehand to ask that question. If your German is limited, say so at the start of the call; the services are used to it, and in several cantons the conversation can be held in English or French.

The process itself usually includes a conversation with the parents, one or more sessions with the child, a standardised procedure, the involvement of the school, and at the end a report with a feedback session. An assessment is therefore not a twenty minute test but a process across several appointments.

The private practice: when it makes sense

There are good reasons for the private route. The waiting time at the cantonal service can be long. Some parents want an assessment that is not tied to the school. Some questions fall outside the school remit. And sometimes it is a second opinion on an existing report.

On costs we deliberately give no range. The figures circulating come from secondary sources with no traceable basis, and we do not write down a number without a source. What you can do instead: ask for a written cost estimate before the first appointment, and check in it which procedures are included, how many sessions are counted in, and whether the written report and the feedback session are part of the price. Those three points explain the biggest differences between two quotes.

Ask as well whether any contribution to the cost is possible. Depending on the question and the canton there are routes, and the only way to find out is to ask.

The two routes compared

The last row is identical in both columns, and that is the point. The professional requirement is the same. The difference lies in access, remit and cost, not in the qualification.

Who may carry out a procedure

Intelligence tests may only be administered in Switzerland by people with a recognised psychology degree. The professional title itself is protected under the Psychology Professions Act, and using it without authorisation is a criminal offence. So anyone offering you a test for your child without that training is not offering you a procedure but a product.

The marker to look for is the FSP specialist title. The FSP is the Federation of Swiss Psychologists, the professional body whose specialist title identifies a recognised practitioner, and you will see the abbreviation after a name on a practice door, on a letterhead and at the end of a report.

Three questions are worth asking before booking an appointment. What training and which specialist title does the person hold. Which instrument is used, and in which norm edition. What does the written report cover. A qualified professional answers all three without hesitating.

For ourselves the same rule cuts the other way: Kognita is an editorial team. We carry out no assessments, we issue no certificates of this kind, and nothing from us can be submitted anywhere.

Why instruments for children are normed by age

A seven year old and a ten year old solve different numbers of tasks, and for a reason that has nothing to do with ability compared with peers: one child is three years older. A raw score on its own therefore says even less with children than with adults.

Age norming solves this by comparing a child only with children of the same age group, often in steps of a few months. That is why the exact date of birth goes into the record, why the test date matters, and why you ask about the norm edition of an instrument.

The same point explains why an adult test is no good here. It has a single reference group for a wide age span. Put a child in front of it and their performance is measured against the wrong group. The result would not be imprecise, it would be meaningless, and it would still look like a number with something to say. That is precisely where the damage lies.

The documented gap: 6.5 per cent against 0.6 per cent

The HfH, the inter-cantonal university of applied sciences whose centre for talent development and gifted education published the figures, names two of them that only become interesting side by side. Around 6.5 per cent of children benefit from gifted education. But only around 0.6 per cent are known to the schools with an assessed giftedness. That is a ratio of roughly eleven to one.

These figures want reading carefully. They do not say that eleven times as many children are gifted as assumed. They say that the group benefiting from support is considerably larger than the group with a completed assessment. Benefiting from support and holding an assessed status are two different things, and the gap between them is above all a gap in the process, not in the children.

For parents two practical points follow. First, not every question needs an assessment. A great deal can be settled first in conversation with the class teacher and the school management. Second, ask early which support measures exist in your canton and what they require. An assessed value is not everywhere the entry ticket, and where it is not, the question saves a lot of walking.

When an assessment is not the first step

Not every question needs a test procedure, and an assessment is not a neutral event. It costs time, it occupies an appointment at the cantonal service, and it turns an open observation into a file. That is often right and sometimes premature.

It is usually premature when the observation has not yet been described. A child who “is bored” may be bored in one subject, or in one way of working, perhaps for three weeks and perhaps for two years. The first step is therefore a conversation with the class teacher that makes it concrete: when, where and how often something occurs.

The same holds in the other direction. If you have the impression that a child is not keeping up despite real effort, you usually get further by first working out whether it concerns a single subject, the pace, the way tasks are set, or the homework situation at home.

The school psychology service also advises at this stage, without a procedure necessarily standing at the end of it. A first conversation is not an application for a test.

Where such a conversation does end with a clear, repeated and described observation that the school cannot place, that is a sign that an assessment by a qualified professional could be worthwhile. It is a next step to discuss, not a conclusion about the child.

School assessments are something else entirely

In lower secondary school parents meet another test concept, and the mix-up is common.

The Stellwerk, published by the Lehrmittelverlag St. Gallen, the teaching materials publisher of the canton of St. Gallen, is a school administered adaptive assessment taken in class 8 and class 9, at roughly age 14 and 15. It runs in ten German-speaking cantons according to the provider’s own list, checked on 13 September 2026, costs CHF 10.00 per pupil and measures school competences against Lehrplan 21, the common curriculum of the German-speaking cantons. It does not measure intelligence. The system is multidimensional and adaptive and reports values on a scale from 200 to 800 points.

It carries weight because of what comes after lower secondary. Broadly there are two routes. One is the Gymnasium, the selective academic upper secondary school that leads to the Matura, the certificate giving direct access to Swiss universities. The other is the Lehre, an apprenticeship combining paid work in a training company with school, which most young people in Switzerland take and which is in no sense a fallback: it leads into protected professions and, through the Berufsmaturität, on to the universities of applied sciences. A Stellwerk result feeds into that conversation, which is why families treat it seriously.

The difference to an assessment is nevertheless fundamental. A school assessment asks where a child stands in the material, and the result changes with teaching. An intelligence procedure asks about recognising and applying rules in unfamiliar material, independently of the material taught. A low Stellwerk value in mathematics therefore says nothing about cognitive performance, and a high one says nothing about it either.

In practice that means the school’s results and any report from an assessment answer different questions. Both belong in the conversation, but neither replaces the other.

What a value says about a child

Even a carefully obtained value is an estimate with a measurement error, and it describes a performance on one particular day. Daily form, tiredness, nervousness and the relationship with the person testing all shift the result. A good report therefore states a confidence range and not just a number. If a report contains a single number without a range, that is a good reason for a question in the feedback session.

For placing the value, the SPILK classification of 2023 applies in Switzerland. It expressly calls the band from 85 to 114 a normal variant, that is the standard case, and the band from 130 upwards very high intelligence or intellectual giftedness. What the individual figures mean, and why the percentile rank says more than the value itself, is set out at length in our article on the IQ scale and its classification.

What matters is what a value is not. It is not a statement about a child’s character, not a prediction about their path and not a ranking within the class. It is a statement of position in a distribution, obtained over one afternoon.

Before the appointment

• Write the question down. What exactly do you want to know. A precise question leads to a more useful report than a wish for a number.
• Bring the school in. The class teacher’s observations, school reports and the child’s own work are often more informative for placing the result than the test alone.
• Do not practise. Preparing with practice tasks changes the result and makes it less useful.
• Tell the child. They should know that it is not an exam, that you cannot fail it, and that nothing depends on how many tasks they solve.
• Ask about the report. Clarify in advance whether a written report and a feedback session are included.

Teenagers and Mensa Schweiz

For older teenagers there is one further route. Mensa Schweiz, the Swiss branch of the international high-IQ society, runs a non-verbal admission test from age 15 for CHF 80, reduced to CHF 40 for pupils, and a multidimensional test with a German language section from age 14 for CHF 100, reduced to CHF 50. An existing result from a recognised procedure can be submitted as prior evidence, free of charge for under 18s. Mensa Schweiz does not accept unsupervised online tests, and that includes ours.

For younger children this route does not exist, and in any case it replaces no assessment: an admission test answers only the question of whether a result lies above a threshold. About school questions it says nothing.

If you take only one point away from this article, take this one: call the school psychology service of your canton before you pay for anything anywhere. The service exists, it is free of charge for pupils, and it answers exactly the questions most parents start searching with.