Dyslexic students must wait for exam relief

Dyslexia is defined by Chambers dictionary as "word-blindness, great difficulty in learning to read or spell, unrelated to intellectual competence and of unknown cause." Last autumn parents of dyslexic children had a worrying reply to their application to the Department of Education and Science for special exam arrangements for this year's Leaving Cert.

They were told that "all candidates at the State examinations are assessed under standard marking schemes which are applied equally to the work of all candidates. It is not the case that different marking schemes are used as a response to disabilities notified to my Department."

This is just what many parents had been led to believe existed. Peter Mooney, of Cabra, Dublin, was typical of several who contacted us when he said his dyslexic son was given special consideration in the Junior Cert. "Our understanding of this at the time was that his scripts were placed in a special envelope and that they may have been given to an examiner who was experienced with dyslexic children," he says.

This last point was not correct, says Anne Hughes, of the Association of Children and Adults with Learning Disabilities. What did happen was that the examiner correcting a dyslexic student's paper was made aware that his or her school had expressed concern about the effect of the disability on a student's exam performance. This was "a minimum arrangement," with questionable benefits for the student concerned, says Hughes.

This saga of how dyslexic children's State exam papers are marked goes back the Seventies. Until the early Nineties, special consideration was very random. Some students would get the kind of generous provision available to severely disabled students, including the use of a tape recorder, a word processor, a helper to read the exam questions or to write down the answers. Such provision continues to exist.

Others with similar difficulties would get nothing. Decisions sometimes appeared to be based on how much noise parents could make and, particularly, if they could make it onto the national airwaves or into court.

For some years up to 1994 it was necessary for every student to have a recent psychologist's report. The association pointed out that, given the extreme shortage of psychologists in the Department, this was unfair to those families who could not afford a private assessment. From 1994 on an application from the student's school, plus examples of written work, were deemed sufficient.

Last autumn there was another "change of an operational nature," in the words of the Minister, Micheal Martin. Henceforth, if an examiner had difficulty reading or otherwise understanding a student's exam script, whether or not that student's disability had been brought to the Department's attention, it would be passed to a supervising examiner.

"This means that the concept of `special arrangement' is a thing of the past," says Hughes. "The marking system now relies on an individual corrector being sufficiently aware to differentiate between poorly prepared work and that of a dyslexic student. Clearly even many teachers are failing to make that distinction."

Mooney agrees. In a recent letter to the Minister, he and his partner, Mona Somers, wrote: "Our experience, and it is one recognised by many parents and by research, is that many teachers fail to recognise dyslexic children, dismissing them as lazy or not very bright.

"In our case our son went right through primary school undiagnosed, despite being tested on a regular basis. He was recognised only in secondary school by a teacher who also had a dyslexic child. If teachers who had him five days a week during the school year failed to recognise his condition, can you explain to me how an examiner who will have his script for a short period of time will recognise that he has special needs?"

THE new arrangements simply do not take account of the slow writing and information processing speeds of dyslexic students, says Hughes. Her association has a longstanding request to the Department that extra exam time - for example, 10 minutes per hour - should be allocated to dyslexic students, as is done in Britain and Northern Ireland and in exams in many Irish third-level colleges.

Last month the Minister said it was vital that the work of all candidates be marked according to a common, objective marking scheme "to ensure the validity of the certificate examinations as national instruments of assessment."

Hughes replies: "If dyslexic students had their problems dealt with thoroughly and effectively at an early age - that is, in primary schools - then we might accept this argument. Then many fewer would need help since their writing and comprehension would have speeded up by the time they came to take public exams," says Hughes. "Parents would not have to waste so much energy on demanding a special consideration which does not amount to much."

The Department has now agreed to set up a committee of external experts to advise on the whole area of special exam arrangements, although any recommendations it makes will not be in time to affect this year's exams.