What parents can expect from school

A large number of pupils leave school with very poor reading and writing skills. The government are aware that 12 million members of our nationwide workforce have reading skills lower than those expected from primary school children.

School system letting us down, says CBI

Our education system is not very good at teaching many pupils to read. Local Education Authorities are naturally defensive about this. Generally speaking, impartial advice about dyslexia is not available in schools or from the Local Education Authority (LEA). They may prefer to use the term “specific learning difficulty” instead of “dyslexia”. They are likely to have problems with

• academic arguments: because there is not a single identifiable “cause”, many LEA psychologists refuse to use the term “dyslexia”
• political arguments: some LEAs believe that if they identify and help dyslexic pupils, they are somehow discriminating against other pupils who are having difficulty learning to read
• economic arguments: many LEAs fear that they would not be able to afford to identify and support dyslexic learners in school

The situation is a mess. Some LEA psychologists are prevented from identifying dyslexia because it is not LEA policy. They may know from their observation and assessments that a child is dyslexic, but are prevented from using the label “dyslexia”.

For children that have been identified as experiencing difficulties and have been placed on the special needs register at school, there may be disagreement about how the child’s basic literacy skills are progressing.

Although “reading ages” are no longer commonly used, a real life example illustrates this concern. After a year’s specialist teaching, a child improved their word reading age by 3 months; the score had fallen by a further 9 months over the year. The LEA claimed this “improvement” was evidence of real progress. Our psychologist disagreed. The independent Special Educational Needs Tribunal agreed with our psychologist and the school was forced to improve provision for the child.