Recent studies indicate that Irish schools are not dealing satisfactorily with students with dyslexia. According to a new study carried out earlier this year, almost 80 per cent of dyslexic adults said it is "extremely important" to set about increasing awareness of the condition.

A full 50 per cent were "very dissatisfied" with the help they had got at primary school, with a further 15 per cent saying they were "dissatisfied." With regard to second-level, 43 per cent of adults said they were "very dissatisfied" with the help they got and a further 18 per cent were "dissatisfied."

The study, carried out earlier this year by two educational psychologists with the Association for Children and Adults with Learning Disabilities, contacted adults who were diagnosed between 1985 and this year as being dyslexic.

According to Anne Hughes, administrator of ACLD, "there is nothing near enough awareness of this problem in Ireland. For the public at large it's just information that they don't have. For remedial teachers and psychologists it's more than lack of awareness. It's culpable ignorance. They should know about it.

"When teachers are aware it's generally because they have taken the trouble themselves. It's not sufficiently dealt with in the pre-service training."

Hughes points out that practically no research on dyslexia is available and that schools vary in their appreciation and understanding of it. "When it's discovered it totally depends on the teachers," she says. "Some knock themselves out trying to help. There's no provision in the system to deal with it. The teachers are not expected to deal with it."

There can be reluctance on a teacher's part to recognise the problem. However, she explains, "it's totally individual. It varies. It can range from great co-operation to actual hostility, to victimisation of a child."

The Department of Education is not doing enough to recognise the problem, she says. The Department's response is that it is increasing the number of remedial teachers and resources.

The Department claims that educational needs of pupils with specific learning disabilities can generally be met within the ordinary school system, with the assistance, where appropriate, of a remedial teacher and, in the case of post-primary pupils, guidance counsellors and subject teachers.

"That's not enough," says Hughes. "Not all dyslexic children will come within the remit of remedial teaching. The remedial teacher may be forced to have them . . . and may not have access to special training to help them."

As administrator of ACLD for the past 25 years, she is "cross and angry" at the lack of awareness and at the lack of resources provided to help with the problem. "I'm as angry as a wet hen," she says. "I'm more than frustrated. You'd think I'd have got over it at this stage.

"The kind of help that a child would need has to be geared to that child. We believe the programme needs to be individual and cumulative, designed specifically for the child on a regular basis. There has to be special help for them which has been thought out for them."

According to one expert, dyslexia may be simply defined as "unexpected difficulty in the acquisition of reading and spelling skills." Another definition says that "dyslexia is a language-based learning disorder which is biological in origin and primarilty interferes with the acquisition of print literacy - reading, writing and spelling."

The ACLD says that dyslexia affects about eight per cent of all children. They have difficulty changing oral words to written language and vice versa. They often confuse the order and sequence of letters and numbers.

"Lack of precise agreement on definition makes it impossible to know the extent and prevalence of dyslexia in the population," says Philomena Ott in her recently published book, How to Detect and Manage Dyslexia. Ott, from Newmarket-on-Fergus, Co Clare, is involved in running the Hughenden Dyslexia Centre in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. She says that the symptoms of dyslexia vary widely. "Inconsistency, unpredictability and unexpectedness are its most consistent features," she says.

There is very little published research information about dyslexia in Irish second-level schools. However Robin and Simon McCormack, two students at St Gerard's School, Bray, Co Wicklow, entered a project on dyslexia in the Aer Lingus Young Scientist Competition in 1996. They found that there was only an 0.84 per cent of incidence of SLD (Specific Learning Disability) among the students they surveyed. They maintain that this percentage, which is very low in comparison with international statistics of 4 to 8 per cent, suggests that there are undiagnosed SLD students in our schools.

Some 50 schools replied to their questionnaire, which was sent to 10 per cent of the second-level schools in the country - 71 in total. Their aim was to discover the incidence of formally diagnosed SLD students in the second-level school population. They also wanted to survey the provision of support services for such students in second-level schools.

A small number of replies indicated a zero awareness in their school of SDL and its affect on students. One school said that as all their students went to do a Leaving Cert, it did not have any SLD students. The boys concluded that the needs of SLD students are not being met in most schools.

Anne Hughes says that pre-service training is vital. The ACLD has urged the Department to make a recommendation to training colleges to include a section on dyslexia in their pre-service courses.

The movement to understand and research dyslexia is quite recent, according to Philomena Ott. "It's only in the past 25 years that this whole movement has got going," she says. "It's a medical problem in diagnosis but it's an educational problem in remediation. We have research that shows that up to 10 per cent of the population have some of the symptoms of dyslexia. Four per cent of the population have very severe difficulties."

In her book Ott stresses that many people experience psychological pain which endures for life because their learning difficulties were not recognised while they were at school. "There is general consensus that the best management for dyslexics is in mainstream education where they can be withdrawn for one-to-one specialist tuition," she writes. "A very small percentage of severely dyslexic pupils may need to attend schools for dyslexics.

"I first became aware of this problem when I worked in Orwell Road in Dublin the late Sixties. We had a reading clinic . . . their problems were often attributed to emotional difficulties within the family.

"I had a boy of eight who was gifted. He had an IQ of 150 but he couldn't read. My task was to help him. We used the look-and-say method, using flash cards. He couldn't write his own name or his own address. Yet he had an encyclopaedic general knowledge. He knew the names of all the presidents in countries around the world and the names of the capital cities."

The informed classroom teacher can, according to Ott, create a supportive and constructive learning environment when he or she accepts and understands that dyslexic children have different learning styles and that they are more prone to errors and defects, such as poor spelling and short-term memory problems. "Teaching a dyslexic pupil requires skill, knowledge, patience, flexibility and the ability to listen," she explains. "Sympathy and good intentions do not teach a dyslexic. Structured, systematic, cumulative multi-sensory teaching does. Theoretical knowledge needs to be supported by practical experience."

Some of the comments from the respondents to the ACLD study show the frustration, anger and disappointment that people with dyslexia have to contend with. One adult wrote that the school should be able to "recognise the problem - not keep us in the lowest class at second-level." Another said: "You begin to get used to failing."