Like many people, I was interested to read about Mollie King’s appearance at a parliamentary committee this week to talk about her dyslexia. By all accounts, the singer spoke impressively about her experience as a schoolgirl who ‘felt stupid’ until she was diagnosed and she will have secured valuable airtime for the British Dyslexia Association for whom she is an ambassador.
It is undeniably important to see attractive, successful people admitting publicly that they have dyslexia.
I’d suggest it’s doubly important that we see attractive successful women saying so; in my experience, girls are much better than boys at masking their problems and I’d suspect this is at least a factor in the higher diagnosis rates for boys.
Two things struck me from the report I read on the BBC website.
First, she seemed to feel fortunate that her problem was spotted as early as age 10.
As early as 10? I know that many many children are diagnosed much later than that but, really? Is that the best we can do? It strikes me that’s still a very long time in which plenty of ‘bad code’ can be written.
She also suggested that as many as 80% of students with dyslexia are undiagnosed.
Now, I don’t know quite how reliable that figure is. Frankly, I’m not that bothered how accurate it is. Even if it’s only half that, it’s still a monstrously high number.
I’m not that bothered because the human cost is much more persuasive. It’s heartbreaking to see the trauma that the prospect of reading causes some children.
One of the students I’m currently tutoring towards her A-Level Theatre exam is dyslexic. She is bright and funny and engaging. You’d give her a job instantly if you met her.
But she apologises every time she refers to something she has written. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know she’s doing it.
Apology has just become part of her state of being.
I’ve worked with numerous colleagues in teaching who are secret dyslexics. For them, report writing is a time of torment and they spend hours and hours checking their work lest their inability to spell peninsula should cast doubt on their ability to recognise one.
If only they knew how few parents actually read the reports. When my last school went totally digital, the analytics suggested it was only around 35%.
Perhaps the time when, as a second year teacher, I drunkenly wrote a whole set of reports in the style of a horse-racing commentator wasn’t quite the problem my deputy head perceived it to be.
We have friends whose youngest son, diagnosed only at the very end of his school career, has resigned himself to a series of low grade jobs because he feels ill-equipped to cope with anything more ambitious. I suspect he’s far from alone.
The human cost is the reason we have to get better at spotting children with reading problems much earlier. Only when we can routinely identify and help children in years 3 and 4 will we start to make real progress.
I’m here to tell you that we can do that. We have the technology. It’s called Lexplore and within 5 minutes it can identify children as young as six who have reading problems and will need additional help.
It’s amazing. It should be available in every school in the country.
Only then will we develop students who don’t feel the need to apologise every time they read.
Maybe we’ll even stop talking about people ‘admitting’ their dyslexia in public as if it’s something to feel guilty about.
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