Sophie should be in the middle of her Junior Cycle exams, but instead she’s at home sorting out clothes in her wardrobe.
She is dyslexic and after a very difficult few years, where the impacts of dyslexia on Sophie’s learning began to affect her life beyond the classroom, her mother made the difficult decision that her daughter shouldn’t sit the exams.
“She’s embarrassed not to be sitting the exams,” says her mother, Kate, especially as people have asked her why. Sophie has given various excuses to those who ask. “She’s trying to find a way to avoid people thinking she’s not clever.
Sophie was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was six years old, her mother, who is also an SNA, explains. Dyslexia has made her life “so much more difficult”, her mother says.
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Those difficulties increased significantly when Sophie went to secondary school. She was “just thrown straight into the deep end and she was expected really to do the same level work as everyone else”.
Kate doesn’t blame the teachers. “It’s not really their fault because they don’t have the understanding. That’s the problem with dyslexia. When people hear the word dyslexia they think, ‘Oh, they just can’t spell properly’. And that’s the biggest misconception of dyslexia ever. Because dyslexia is so much more.”
The lack of understanding makes life very difficult for adults and children, Kate says. “Especially school life, when you’re all put into the same box, are expected to know the same things, be able to learn the same things, and that’s just not the case.”
Sophie struggled to keep up with her school work in secondary school and began to stop attending. “She was getting sick every day from the anxiety. She was having panic attacks in school.”
She got support from a “lovely” special education teacher, Kate explains, “but she was embarrassed going into special education classes. Because, when they hit the age of 14, 15, people start noticing, and they start calling you names and they’re slagging you. And she really took that to heart.”
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Sophie was put on a reduced and restricted timetable and she didn’t do some classes. “It was coming closer to the exams and we ended up having to bring her to Pieta House because she was so stressed out over the exams.”
Kate’s decision that Sophie shouldn’t sit the Junior Cycle exams, a decision taken alongside her school, was not an easy one, she explains. “I was stuck between a rock and a hard place– do I encourage her to go and do the exams, or is that putting too much pressure on her? Am I making the anxiety worse?”
She had hoped her daughter might sit the exams in the end, and Kate sought the supports she was entitled to. “She had gotten the allocation. She had gotten the 10-minute additional time and she had gotten the spelling waiver. She could not believe that the [additional] time allowance was only 10 minutes. She was like, ‘Mam, it would take me 10 minutes to read one question’.”
Kate has another child who is dyslexic, “but not to the same level”. She has seen the different efforts put in by her children without dyslexia, versus the work Sophie needs to do, often with few positive results. “It’s really hard to get the proper guidance. A lot of the time what you’re told is, ‘keep reading to her. Get her to keep reading’. That doesn’t work for everyone, because everyone is different.
“A lot of the school refusal comes from - there are teachers who have a great understanding of this and there are teachers who have very little understanding. So, she is constantly told, ‘You’re just not trying hard enough’. But none of these teachers are at home, alongside me watching how hard she tries. And that comment really, really gets her. It just ruins everything. She just can’t wait to be finished school.”
“She is amazing at so many other things,” Kate says. Sophie will begin studying the Leaving Certificate Applied in September. “That’s where she needs to be. That’s where she will thrive.”
Sophie is hoping to study psychology when she finishes school and Kate is determined to help her realise that dream, “whatever back doors we need to go through”.
- Names have been changed but are known to The Irish Times
