School-readiness assessments are a subset of psycho-educational assessments and are usually recommended for children in the last term of their Grade R year.

Although it is legally required for a learner that is the age of 7 to be placed in grade one, there are cases where a learner is not considered to be school ready, and in these cases the learners need to be identified early and the correct applications and provisions need to be made for them. Put very simply, a learner is considered to be school ready when deemed to be able to cope with the formal demands of schooling.  These demands are not only intellectual but also emotional, perceptual and conceptual. Children are deemed to be intellectually school-ready if they score a mental age of 6 years 3 months on standardized school readiness assessments.  The aims is to holistically assess the child’s development up to this point in his or her life in the physical, psycho-motor, socio-emotional, behaviour, language, and cognitive domains to make recommendations to schools regarding the child’s readiness to enter primary school. School readiness describes both the preparedness of a child to engage in and benefit from learning experiences, and the ability of a school to meet the needs of all learners enrolled for formal education.