Peter and the Cat’ is a narrative re-telling task that yields a descriptive profile of a child’s development of key narrative competencies. It was designed by speech and language pathologists, Leanne Allan and Suze Leitão in collaboration with the teachers and principal of a Language Development Centre in Western Australia following more than seven years of development and testing.

Narrative sampling allows the capture of key skills required in the transition to a literate style of language so critical for school success. In addition, sampling oral language beyond the sentence level provides information on broader communicative competence.

This established assessment is used by therapists, teachers and researchers across the world and is recommended in the recent influential publication, ‘Developing language and literacy: effective intervention in the early years’, Julia M. Carroll et al, 2011.

The iPad version of the assessment uses the same profiling of language skills but brings together an illustrated ebook with voice overs, audio recording, on screen profiling, dictation facility (new iPad only), automatic report generation, iCloud, Dropbox and email connections, enabling an assessment to be made quickly and efficiently with less preparation time.

The final report, together with the audio recording of the child’s re-tell, can be transferred to a desktop computer via email or Dropbox. The report is in plain text so it can easily be incorporated into other reports or case files.

The voice-overs for the story can be selected from UK, US, Australian and South African speakers. Issues of confidentiality have been taken into account by password protecting data.