This won’t read your child’s writing — that takes an actual piece of it, which is what the paragraph reading and the trial lesson are for. What it can do is take what you already know about where things stand, and point toward the right next step.

Most parents arrive with a symptom rather than a diagnosis: the marks have slipped, or the essays come back with comments nobody can act on, or a child who used to read has stopped. Those three look similar from the outside and are rarely the same problem underneath. The questions below are the ones worth asking before deciding what kind of help is actually needed.

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What year is your child in?

What the questions are getting at

Each one separates a different pair of causes that produce the same-looking result on a report.

Whether the difficulty is reading or writing.A student who cannot find anything to say about a text usually has not understood it closely enough to have something to say. That is a reading problem wearing a writing problem’s clothes, and it is treated differently.
Whether structure or sentences is the constraint. Essays that lose marks for organisation and essays that lose them line by line need opposite kinds of attention. Teaching paragraph structure to a student whose sentences are the problem produces a well-organised piece that still reads poorly.
Whether the work is unclear or merely unfinished. A great deal of mid-range writing is a first draft handed in as a final one. That is a process issue, not a capability one, and the remedy is much shorter.
Whether confidence is cause or consequence. A child avoiding English because it has gone badly is a different case from one going badly because they avoid it — and the order matters for where to start.
How much time there actually is. What is worth starting eighteen months before an exam is not what is worth starting six weeks before one.

What it cannot tell you

Anything that needs the writing itself. A self-assessment collects your impressions, and impressions are a reasonable starting point and a poor finishing one — parents routinely under-rate work that is nearly there and over-rate work that is fluent but unspecific. The only thing that settles it is someone reading a real piece closely, which is what the paragraph reading does in a single paragraph, and what the trial lesson does at length.