Sylva is an app for parents or carers that brings together a range of tools and resources for understanding neurodivergent traits all in one place. Sylva helps parents and carers gain a better understanding of what might be going on for their child and offers insights and guidance on adjustments at home and in school. It also offers a range of coaches to support your journey, including a parenting coach, Hazel, that is trained to support your child’s unique needs.

There are tens of thousands of children currently on autism and ADHD assessment waiting lists across the UK. This is putting huge pressure on many families who are struggling to manage challenging behaviours in their children and young people. Sylva is designed for parents or carers who want to gain a better understanding of what might be going on for their child and whether they might be neurodivergent. It can help people who are at the start of this journey or for families who are waiting for professional assessments and need some immediate support.

You will first be asked some questions about your child, including their age. This is because Sylva has different tests according to the age of the child. You can then start taking a test. We recommend starting with an autism or ADHD test as these are the most comprehensive, allowing Sylva to start building a more detailed profile of your child.

On completion of the test, you can choose to take additional tests to discover if there are other traits. Alongside the autism and ADHD tests, there are tests for anxiety, depression, trauma and stress, behavioural and emotional issues and sensory processing. From here, you can take an even deeper dive into your child’s profile to discover more about other elements that they may be struggling with, including thinking habits, social skills and mental adaptability.

On completion of the test(s), Sylva will provide you with a report on your child’s strengths and needs and strategies to help in school and at home. The more tests you complete, the more personalised the strategies become.

For further support, you can talk to Sylva’s parenting coach, Hazel. Using AI-powered conversations, Hazel will listen and give you compassionate support that is completely personal to your situation. 

We have researched well over 100 screening tests using standard academic and research techniques, focusing mainly on studies in academic journals, to find the tests with high quality validation studies. This saves parents and carers many hours of research. AQ50 was selected as Sylva’s autism test on this basis. The NHS guidance and World Health Organisation (WHO) have a list of conditions that can be mistaken for autism and/or often exist alongside autism, so Sylva includes tests for all of these too. 

The one exception is Sylva’s sensory processing test. We discovered that there is not one single test that assesses sensory processing difficulties across all the different senses. We know that this is an important, and often overlooked, need so we evaluated the tests that already exist and then developed our own which offers a deep and broad assessment of sensory issues.

Sylva uses the following several tests to give you a clearer picture of your child’s strengths and challenges.

Autism - AQ50: a test with 50 items that assesses autistic traits in adults and children and young people.

ADHD - SWAN: a rating scale used to assess the presence of ADHD symptoms in children and young people.

How your child handles demands - EDA8: a caregiver-reported questionnaire that assesses traits and behaviours relating to demand avoidance in children.

Emotions, behaviour and friendships - SDQP4-17: A strengths and difficulties questionnaire exploring these areas.

Anxiety, OCD, depression - RCADS: The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale is a 47-item questionnaire to assess symptoms of anxiety and depression in children and young people.

How senses are experienced - SM-13: A test that explores reactions to sensory experiences. Developed by Spicy Minds. Read more about it here.

Sylva is the only online tool to combine robust tests and 24/7 personalised support for understanding autism, its characteristics (such as sensory processing, social-emotional challenges and rigid thinking) and co-existing traits (such as anxiety and ADHD) all in one place. It is also the only app to offer AI-delivered support to parents and carers of young people who may have autism, as well as other neurodivergent traits. This means that parents/carers can make real-time adjustments to improve their child’s wellbeing. Sylva has been developed with clinical oversight so parents can trust in its rigour. 

Parents and carers should be able to complete the questions in a couple of hours – it’s specifically designed to be as easy as possible so that you can get the insights you need from home and quickly.

Respect for your privacy is coded deep into our architecture. The conversations you have with Sylva are automatically anonymised and redacted, using GDPR and HIPAA-compliant processes, which means we cannot read conversations in full or link anything back to you - except in rare safety situations.

Our processes are aligned to GDPR, Cyber Essentials, NHS Security Standards and ISO27001.

Read about our processes and our security policy here.

Sylva is not a diagnostic tool or a substitute for professional, medical or psychological evaluation. It is intended to provide support and resources for parents or carers who are struggling to understand what might be going on for their child. Our focus with Sylva is to give parents/carers deeper insights and identify traits rather than offering a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response to whether a child is autistic or ADHD.  

Sylva has been developed with oversight and evaluation by Dr Freddy Jackson Brown, a chartered clinical psychologist (registered with the Health and Care Professions Council) who has more than 25 years’ experience supporting autistic children and families in the NHS. Dr Jackson Brown is an associate fellow at the University of Warwick and has published more than 35 peer-reviewed papers and five books on the subject.

We are continuously checking Sylva to make sure the AI-powered conversations its parenting coach, Hazel, has with families are safe. This involves asking Hazel a large number of questions, relating to autism, that parents/carers may be wanting answers to and then reviewing Hazel’s replies. This allows us to test its safety limits to make sure it is able to identify safeguarding red flags. It also allows us to make sure Hazel is as culturally sensitive as possible, so that the conversations take account for cultural differences and nuance. Alongside this, we’ve put Hazel through another testing process to ensure it rejects requests that are inappropriate or illegal. Hazel is also undergoing usability tests with a small group of pilot users, allowing us to evaluate how Hazel is handling real-time situations. This rigorous approach is overseen by our clinical lead, Dr Freddy Brown.

You will receive a profile of your child’s qualities and challenges, alongside practical suggestions of adjustments for home and school. The report can be downloaded and printed and it can be used to inform your child’s learning plan at school, sometimes known as a ‘pen picture’ or ‘pupil passport.’

Yes. Sylva will give ideas for reasonable adjustments that you can ask your child’s school to make. You may need to negotiate with the school about what is achievable within the context of each individual setting.

At this stage, no. We hope that in time, it will be used to alert National Health Services to urgent cases that need to be prioritised.