Lost for words: How the State is failing our dyslexic children

Some of the most successful and creative people in the world have lived or live with dyslexia. However, not all dyslexic children are getting to reach their potential. A child who has dyslexia needs to be diagnosed as soon as possible.

Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, WB Yeats, Richard Branson, Tom Cruise, Winston Churchill, Fred Astaire, John Lennon, William Wordsworth, Robin Williams, Charles Darwin.

An eclectic group, a talented group. Entertainers, painters, dancers, singers, poets and entrepreneurs. Apart from an excess of talent, this group would seem to have little in common. But all of them experienced serious problems with words and figures.

Trouble with words or figures essentially describes dyslexia at its most basic level. The word itself derives from the Greek words "dys" (bad or difficult) and "lexis", meaning word.

It does not mean slow nor lazy. Richard Branson, one of the best known business figures in the world never made it through secondary school. He goes blank at inopportune moments, he has to write information, such as people's names, on the back of his hand. Sometimes, he even confuses gross profit with net! But, for all those difficulties, he is hardly slow or lazy.

One can only imagine how children who suffered from dyslexia managed to survive in the austere classrooms of 1950s Ireland. In most cases, they didn't. They left school believing they were solely to blame for their educational failures. That they were slow, stupid or lazy and there was nothing more to be said.

Nowadays, we know more - or should know more. We know that children with dyslexia learn differently. They see words differently, they process information differently, they need time to answer questions.

That is recognised around the world and among Irish policy makers, although according to a survey undertaken two years ago, a minority of teachers still know little about dyslexic children and how to handle them in the classroom.

In many respects, the deeper understanding of dyslexia has not necessarily translated into better services for children with the condition. The issue of dyslexia and getting children assessed has been low down the political, media and educational agenda for many years.

While the Trojan work of Kathy Sinnott on behalf of her son Jamie raised the profile of autism to a new level with a very visible court case, the issue of dyslexia has been somewhat neglected.

Someone who has not been neglecting the problem is Anne Hughes, director of the Dyslexia Association of Ireland (DAI). She acknowledges the considerable improvements over the last three to five years, but says "there are still some terrible anomalies".

The anomalies currently placing the greatest strain on families are the lack of assessment and the provision of services in schools. Getting a child assessed comes at the start of the whole process. There are huge waiting lists for assessments at present. DAI has a waiting time of seven to nine months, most private psychologists have even longer waiting times.

One psychologist who spoke to The Irish Times, Anna Dangerfield, says she is booked up until next September. She says most of her colleagues could have similar waiting times. "There is a huge demand for limited resources," she says. "While there are a large number of psychology students studying at third level, not all of them decide to go into educational psychology."

The costs are also high for families with tight budgets, while the DAI will do an assessment for €230, private psychologists often charge between €300 and €500. The State offers assessments though the National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS) and schools decide who to refer to NEPS psychologists.

The assessments in this case are free, but the coverage can be patchy and your child may have to wait for a long period.

The publicly-funded NEPS refuses to say how long pupils normally have to wait. It says it does not work through a conventional list and NEPS psychologists get to children as soon as practicable.

But parents have no way of knowing what the average waiting time is in their area. "How long is a piece of a string?" said one source.

What we do know is that schools are only allowed to offer two assessments per 100 pupils via NEPS. While there is some flexibility, a school of 300 pupils with, potentially, up to 20 dyslexic children has a serious problem.

With the Department of Education donning its financial hairshirt for the next year or two, schools are worried that any leeway there was before in this area is about to disappear.

Getting your child assessed is no small matter. A child who has dyslexia needs to be diagnosed as soon as possible so they do not fall behind and get the right sort of teaching.

It must be remembered that dyslexia is not simply a reading problem. It can also have an affect on learning a second language, on progress in maths and several others subjects.

Because many schools stream, the earlier the school knows the score the better. A book which guides parents on the issue of dyslexia and children, Lost for Words, by Wyn McCormack, spells out the dangers of streaming dyslexic children.

"The entrance assessment is not likely to show his strengths, and unless the psychological assessment is taken into account, he can be placed in a class that will improve on basic skills, but will not provide the challenge and stimulus he needs and the verbal discussion he is capable. He may become bored at the slow pace of the class," she writes.

Whatever about streaming, that is not the only way the school can hamper the chances of a dyslexic pupil. The other glaring problem is you need to have a pretty serious problem before you get support in school.

Under guidelines from the Department of Education, children have to be in the bottom 10 per cent of reading performance before they are entitled to a learning support teacher, or as they used to known - a remedial teacher.

To get one-on-one tuition from a resource teacher you have to be in the bottom two per cent. As one teacher said this week: "Many of the children falling outside these parameters have serious problems, but they get virtually no support because of the rigid adherence to this scale".

A report from the Taskforce on Dyslexia was published last year and gave a raft of suggestions to improve all of these matters. Few of them have been implemented thus far.