Wealden Times | WT171 | May 2016 | Restoration & New Build supplement inside

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Making sense of dyslexia
John Graham-Hart on this common, yet challenging condition
For most children, reading can be easy or they may
struggle a little before getting the hang of it. For the
dyslexic child, it’s a whole different ball game. To them,
the printed page can seem a sheet of meaningless, shifting
shapes among which they become confused, frustrated and,
ultimately, lost. However intelligent they may be, however
diligently they may apply themselves, they will always find
making sense of a sequence of letters or numbers a challenge.
According to the British Dyslexia Association, around
four per cent of the population suffers from severe dyslexia
and up to 10 per cent to varying degrees. These figures are,
of course, contentious, simply because defining the condition
and diagnosing individual cases has never been without its
problems. Dyslexia is a chronic difficulty that will continue
to present affected individuals with challenges on a daily basis
for the rest of their lives.
However, it is their school years that these individuals may
find the most challenging because so much early teaching
and learning is done through the written word. Failing to
keep up with their peer group, they may be labelled as ‘slow’.
Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was “too stupid to
learn anything”. The damage to a child’s self-esteem can be
devastating.
The exact cause of dyslexia is unknown but it’s thought
that certain genes inherited from your parents may act
together in a way that affects how some parts of the brain
develop during early life. It often appears to run in families.
Again, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that dyslexia has
nothing whatever to do with IQ. People with dyslexia often
have good skills in other areas, such as creative thinking and
problem solving – which may go some way to explaining why
dyslexics are more likely to become millionaires than other
children.
A great deal will depend on identifying the problem early
and seeking the right help. If you think your child may have
dyslexia, the first step is to speak to their teacher or their
school’s special needs coordinator about your concerns. They
may be able to offer additional support.
This support may include occasional one-to-one teaching
or lessons in a small group with a specialist teacher, the use
of phonics – a special learning technique that focuses on
improving the ability to identify and process the smaller
sounds that make up words – and technology, such as
computers and speech recognition software.
If your child continues to have problems despite this
support, you or the school may want to consider requesting
a more in-depth assessment from a specialist dyslexia teacher
or an educational psychologist. This can be arranged through
the school, or you can request a private assessment by
contacting an educational psychologist directly – you can
find a directory of chartered psychologists on the British
Psychological Society’s website or a voluntary organisation
such as Dyslexia Action can arrange an assessment.
After this assessment, it may be decided that a child
needs more than merely extra help within the framework of a
traditional academic environment. In which case, the solution
may be a school such as Frewen College, which specializes in
helping children with a range of Specific Learning Difficulties
which include problems such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and
attention deficit disorder. Unlike a traditional school where
additional help is a bolt-on, schools like Frewen take a holistic
approach.
“Frewen is not a traditional school with extra help for
dyslexia,” says the Principal, Nick Goodman. “The support is
provided in all lessons, all of the time. All our classroom staff,
including Teaching Assistants, have specialist dyslexia training.
We have a typical maximum class size of eight pupils, and
there is often a second adult, or learning support assistant, in
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