Revolutionary procedures in the treatment of children have been adopted by Queen's University Belfast researcher Martin McPhillips, who tells Anne Byrne about the excitement it has caused

Imagine an 11-year-old child swimming in amniotic fluid, slowly uncurling itself, moving its hands and waving its legs, eyes closed, concentrating, counting.

Research fellow Martin McPhillips takes children back to the womb, asking them to replicate, in air, movements they would have made in a liquid medium - and, bizarrely, by so doing he claims to improve their reading and writing abilities. A BBC documentary about his research shows children first feeling silly, then relaxing, enjoying the sessions, gaining confidence in themselves, and, finally, doing better at school.

In person, Martin McPhillips is soft-spoken, diffident, correcting himself almost before he has completed a sentence. An unlikely peddler of revolution.

He began his career as a special-needs teacher. "Some 10 children, aged 11 to 14, shambled into the classroom. It was quite obvious that they had more problems than reading and writing. Many of them wouldn't participate in sports or physical education. They were awkward and clumsy." As a teacher, he says he was left to his own devices. "If you could entertain these children, the school was happy. I started to look at what was available - what motor programmes were around. I became particularly interested in the work of Raymond Dart, an anatomist, who became a psychological anthropologist. He had a son with mild cerebral palsy. Out of that emerged his interest in movement." The Dart procedures recapitulate many of the movements that humans make as they go from foetal life to early life (from womb to walking), he says.

McPhillips work builds on Dart's ideas. "Dart died in 1988. I never met him and that's probably my biggest regret." McPhillips was very encouraged by the difference he perceived in the children as he worked with them. "But I didn't know if it was just the general environment or the specific programme I had developed.

"It's very easy to get carried away. You need to go through a formal process of evaluation. Very often even dramatic effects will vanish when they are put to formal tests." He went to QUB in 1995 to pilot and refine his research and to run formal trials. A neurodevelopmental basis for a range of learning difficulties, including reading delay, was already suggested in the literature, which linked the persistence of primary reflexes to learning difficulty.

Primary reflexes are movement patterns that emerge during foetal life and were, in the course of evolution, crucial for the survival of the newborn. We're all familiar with what happens when you put a finger in a baby's palm, he or she grabs it - the grasp reflex. Rooting and sucking are also primary reflexes. In all, more than 70 of these reflexes have been identified.

In normal development, the primary-reflex system is inhibited or transformed in the first year of life and a secondary or postural reflex system emerges.

This forms the basis of adult co-ordinated movement.

However, primary movements may persist for certain children beyond their normal time span and disrupt subsequent development, McPhillips says. Severe persistence of primary reflexes indicates "predominantly intractable, organic problems, as in cerebral palsy, where children experience extreme motor difficulties and significant reading difficulties despite adequate levels of intelligence.

"Relatively milder persistence, however, is associated with less severe disorders, including specific learning difficulties." It's not known what switches off the primary reflexes or why they persist in some children. It was thought that they could only be switched off in early childhood. But McPhillips suggests that the repetition of primary-reflex movement plays a major role in their inhibition and that they can be turned off at a much later stage, possibly, even in adulthood.

With the resources available in QUB's school of psychology, McPhillips began to refine and develop a movement programme, which is now known as Primary Movement. Of university life, McPhillips says, "The whole status element is a problem. I hate the red tape." He didn't register for a PhD initially, but has since done so. "When it started to impact on grant-making bodies, then I became interested. They treat you differently if you don't have a PhD, although I am working beyond PhD level; my research assistant has a PhD." A controlled study, carried out by McPhillips and colleagues - published in The Lancet in 2000 - reported significant improvement in learning difficulties among the test group (aged 11 to 14 years). "There was a huge public response, which we didn't expect. The BBC made a documentary. Very quickly, we started an educational charity to run training courses for primary and second-level teachers." So far, there are 50 trained teachers in the Republic and 70 in Northern Ireland. The teacher-training course consists of one day a week, over an eight-week period, and costs £1,250 sterling.

McPhillips has just completed a study which examines the prevalence of primary reflexes in the mainstream school population. The findings are not yet published, but of the 409 10-year-old children, in 12 schools, a majority of those with difficulties had evidence of primary reflexes.

He is concerned that as his programme gains publicity, other people are offering copycat programmes, that are not research-based. He cites the case of a young child whose jaw was black and blue after doing a series of inappropriate movements. McPhillips was called in to see the child, who is now making good progress with Primary Movement.

There are also other creditable programmes based on the neuro-developmental approach and it can be difficult for parents to differentiate. McPhillips stresses that Primary Movement itself is not an alternative to traditional teaching methods. Parents of children with learning difficulties are particularly vulnerable and any hope may be enough to persuade them to try a new approach. There have been a variety of causes and "cures" proposed for learning difficulties in recent years. Some approaches work for subsets of children. It's likely that Primary Movement will fit into this category. As of yet, there is no one panacea.

McPhillips is currently working with pre-school children, in Holy Cross Nursery School, in Belfast. The location was chosen before the difficulties at the attached Holy Cross School began. "While these children use a separate entrance, they may have older brothers or sisters who were traumatised," he says.

Undeterred by the nearby troubles and occasional access difficulties, he says, "I'm genuinely thrilled to be working with the nursery children at Holy Cross. It's an early intervention course and might prevent a lot of problems arising. It's something I feel very enthusiastic about."

Parents of children with learning disabilities can look for advice and support - and guidelines on choosing programmes - from the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. Tel: (01) 679 0276.