By Gerald Haigh, Writer & Consultant on Education Management
Sir Jim Rose’s Review of dyslexia (Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties’. June 2009) taken together with the government’s commitment to provide £10m of support, including training for 4,000 specialist teachers, is a huge morale booster for families affected by the condition.
One simple statement in the Review, in particular, will bring comfort to many –
“… dyslexia is identifiable as a developmental difficulty of language learning and cognition. In other words, it is now widely accepted that dyslexia exists.”
It’s time, the Review says, to move on from talking about whether there is such a thing as dyslexia, and focus instead on identification and intervention.
I have an elderly friend who will excuse her lack of interest in reading and her nervousness when she’s confronted with an official document by saying, “I think I must be borderline dyslexic.”
Now I don’t know if she is or not, and for that matter neither does she. The point is that the label gives her something to hide behind. It says, in effect. “It’s not my fault. I don’t want you to think I’m dim.”
She neatly illustrates a problem that’s always bedevilled discussion of dyslexia. Long ago, when I was a special needs teacher in what we then called the “remedial department” of a Midlands comprehensive, some of my colleagues, including authority advisers, were almost paranoid about the word “dyslexia”. They believed it to be a label wielded by middle class families who couldn’t come to terms with their children’s slow progress. Exasperated headteachers told of “pushy” parents coming into school waving reports from expensive private practitioners, using them to demand an unfair share of scarce resources.
The sad fact is, of course, that as in so many confrontations, there was some truth on both sides. There certainly were – many parents will say there still are – stubbornly defensive schools and teachers, slow even to recognise, let alone deal with what is a highly specific learning difficulty. (The Rose Review gives much space to these parental concerns, not least because, as it strongly emphasises, this is an area where home-school co-operation is vital.)
And, yes, the parents who will angrily dismiss any other judgment than their own, they exist too. The tragedy is that in the stand-off between schools and families, barriers have gone up that leave a lot of children without the specialist provision that could change their lives.
The Rose Review says something else that’s very important and bears directly on the emotional heat around dyslexia. “It is best thought of as a continuum, not a distinct category, and there are no clear cut-off points.”
In other words, dyslexia isn’t something that you either have or not.
GL Assessment’s own research, carried out in the development of their own dyslexia materials, bears this out. Publishing Director Andrew Thraves says, “In a research project involving 1334 students in mainstream schools, 6% showed ‘mild signs of dyslexia’, 4% showed signs of being ‘moderately dyslexic’ and 2% were ‘severely dyslexic’.”
(On that evidence, I wonder, in passing, why we don’t talk about a “dyslexic spectrum” as we do about an autistic spectrum.)
But that lack of clarity is precisely why it’s so easy for a sterile “He’s dyslexic!” “No he isn’t!” argument to develop, and why there are widely differing estimates of how many people are affected.
It’s also yet another reason why there has to be open – and open-minded -- evidence-based discourse between families and schools. In the end, maybe, someone has to say, “Forget the label for the moment. Let’s focus entirely on what we know – through observation and assessment -- the child’s having trouble with. When we’re agreed about that, we can move on together and decide what can be done to help.”
Whatever that help turns out to be, we can be sure it’ll be about handling words. Dyslexia, essentially, is about having trouble with words, and it’s in the world of words that intervention has to take place -- in class, at home, in a specialist unit, or all of those. There are no shortcuts, and so in the Rose review you’ll look in vain for anything about coloured spectacles or the use of physical exercises.
But, surely, if dyslexia is caused, as some say, by linkage failures in the cerebellum, where also reside skills around movement and balance, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to suggest that exercise will help? Over time I’ve written about this. There was the exercise-based Dore Programme, for example, which claimed, to be “A miracle cure” for dyslexia, and for which thousands of parents paid around two thousand pounds per child. On less controversial ground, I’ve visited and described schools that start the children off each morning with a short series of balancing and motor skill exercises, claiming improvements in test scores. They, at least, weren’t charging money, and there are obviously all sorts of benefits in what they were doing.
Now, though, it’s clear that despite many individual testimonials, there’s no acceptable evidence that anything other than good teaching works. The Mayo Clinic’s article on dyslexia puts it clearly. “There's no known way to correct the underlying brain malfunction that causes dyslexia. Dyslexia treatment is by remedial education.”
Which implies that helping children with dyslexia involves specialist teacher intervention. But there are not, and never will be, enough specialist teachers to go round. It’s simply not practical, nor is it ethically acceptable, for a mainstream teacher in the UK system to say, of any kind of special need, “I don’t have to worry about this. The specialist will deal with it.” The good SENCO’s oft-repeated mantra is, “Every teacher is a teacher of special needs.”
Classroom teachers, though, are always under pressure – some to a greater degree than anyone outside teaching can possibly imagine. How can they add to the burden the heavy responsibility of teaching a child with dyslexia?
This is where we find something else that’s excellent about the Rose Review. Tucked away on page 180 there’s a section called “Practical Guidance: ‘What Works’, for children with literacy and dyslexic difficulties who are also experiencing wider difficulties”.
Clearly culled from the galaxy of specialists and teachers who fed into the review, it’s a six-page gold mine of “tips for teachers” - none of which are going to take up more time, and many of which will make the job easier. Many are to do just with clarity – using short blocks of speech, simple sentences, avoiding double meanings and sarcasm, pausing after questions. And, as is so often the case with techniques in the area of special needs, the more you study them the more you realise that every single child in the class, dyslexic or not, is going to benefit from them.
First, though, comes reliable and adequate assessment of the child’s needs. Where, precisely, does the child we think to be dyslexic lie on the continuum? That’s necessary not just to provide a starting point for intervention, but as a benchmark for assessing progress, using a range of appropriate tools. It’s for this purpose that GL Assessment has produced, with leading dyslexia expert Martin Turner, a Dyslexia Portfolio of nine literacy-related assessment procedures enabling teachers to produce a reasonably quick appraisal of a pupil’s literacy abilities and difficulties. This will then inform the design and implementation of an individual learning programme.
Martin Turner points out that the Portfolio will also be an ideal resource for the training of specialist teachers. “The Dyslexia Portfolio is ideally suited to the 4,000 teachers who will be trained to be dyslexia qualified specialist teachers.”
The Rose Review brings great clarity and impetus to the isues around dyslexia. GL Assessment believes that it has the experience and expertise to provide practical, manageable support to what is going to be a new deal for those young people and families who have felt frustrated and sidelined by existing provision.
Rose Review download: http://publications.dcsf.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFunction=productdetails&PageMode=publications&ProductId=DCSF-00659-2009
Excellent video talk by Professor Dorothy Bishop on how to evaluate the evidence for ‘alternative’ dyslexia treatments. She concentrates mainly, with forensic precision, on the claims of the Dore Programme.
www.dystalk.com/talks/60-evaluating-alternative-solutions-for-dyslexia
Mayo Clinic on Dyslexia
www.mayoclinic.com/health/dyslexia/DS00224
British Dyslexia Association www.bdadyslexia.org.uk
GL Assessment’s Dyslexia resources www.gl-assessment.co.uk/sen
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