”Never forget that the teacher of the young reader is the custodian of that child’s destiny.”
(McGuinness. 1998)
Scroll down for a range of free assessments to check on decoding and spelling.
There is no biologically critical period for learning to read and spell as writing systems are recent human inventions. Nevertheless, there is a optimal-time window that opens between the ages of approximately 4 to 6, when virtually all children can begin to be taught the English alphabet code, decoding and spelling skills most efficiently and effectively, through the use of a high-quality phonics programme.
Beginning daily, direct and systematic phonics teaching at the start of Reception/Kindergarten is far from harmful (Macmillan 2004, Rose 2006, Shanahan 2015). It can help prevent a drop in IQ* and a gender gap*. The window never closes but the older a struggling decoder is when high-quality phonics instruction is started, the more difficult it can be to provide the missing code knowledge and skills, eliminate an acquired guessing habit and prevent ”disaffection and disengagement from education.” (Rose 2009. p38).
*Drop in IQ: see https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/teaching-all-children-to-read-and-spell/ and scroll down to ‘Beginning Phonics Instruction in England’s Early Years’.
*Gender gap: see https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/high-quality-phonics-uk-style-synthetic-phonics-linguistic-phonics/ and scroll down to ‘Avoiding the Gender Gap’.
”The most efficient and therefore most pleasurable method of teaching decoding is called ‘synthetic phonics.”
(Hirsch. 2016. Notes p251)
”The signs are there for mums and dads who care to look out for them. If you have a child who brings books home but doesn’t want to read them; a child who is suddenly either too quiet or too aggressive at school; a child who has clearly memorised her early books or who is being described as “possibly dyslexic” or “plateauing” by her teachers — be alert to the possibility that, no matter how old, she may never have learnt to read properly.”
(Ruth Miskin. Sunday Times 26/03/06)
Do not accept any of the following excuses for a child’s decoding and spelling difficulties:
N.B. he/she and his/her are mostly interchangeable.
– Your child isn’t trying hard enough / doesn’t pay attention / needs to concentrate / lacks motivation.
– This pupil has developed ”emotional barriers to reading” as a result of their parent’s anxieties. (Rose 2009. p21)
– He hasn’t memorised the ‘100 or so’ essential sight words yet.
– She’ll never learn to read if she doesn’t love reading.
– ”Nobody hates reading. She simply hasn’t found the right book yet”.
– ”He’s developed learned helplessness. He needs to work more independently and be a risk-taker”.
– Boys are often slow ‘catching on’ to reading. His parents shouldn’t worry; he’ll read when he’s ready.
– ”Dyslexia is part of a student’s whole personality; you can’t cure it.” (FE College’s dyslexia support leaflet).
– ”No one can be good at everything”.
– His brain is wired differently from those of other children who learn to read easily.
– Your child has a neurodevelopmental disability.
– He’s got a phonological/auditory processing defect and is ‘phonemically deaf’.
– The SENCo/EP diagnosed dyslexia so he’ll always struggle with reading. We’ll put some accommodations into place.
– Her brain lacks ‘rhythm’. She needs ”onset-rime, syllable, and rhythm-based instructional approaches”, not SSP.
– Phonics doesn’t work for some pupils. He must use alternative methods or he’ll never learn to read.
– She’s a very able reader but failed the phonics check because she’s ”moved beyond reading phonetically”.
– He’s a super confident reader but failed the check because of its pseudo-words and lack of context.
– We have to teach phonics nowadays but it doesn’t suit his visual learning style.
– All children are different; this pupil needs to use other strategies as he finds phonics too difficult.
– She’s a visual / kinesthetic learner so she’ll struggle with any phonics programme.
– His ”brain isn’t well matched to a literacy-based society.”
– You have unrealistic expectations; she’s just not academic.
– It’s because of the family’s low socio-economic status.
– It’s because the family lacks cultural capital.
– It’s to be expected; his parents are illiterate.
– It’s because she’s in a single-parent family.
– It’s because the family is white, working-class.
– It’s because the family is black, Caribbean.
– It’s because she has too many siblings at home.
– It’s because he’s left-handed / right-brained.
– It’s due to visual stress; she needs glasses with tinted lenses or overlays/colour-tinted paper.
– It’s because his diet is/was deficient in essential fatty acids.
– She’s not (spiritually) ready to read; her second teeth haven’t appeared yet.
– He’s not developmentally ready to hear phonemes yet; we’ll use a rhyming analogy approach for now.
– It’s because she skipped the infant crawling stage and went straight to walking.
– You haven’t / don’t read enough to him at home.
– It’s because she lacks a growth mindset.
– You didn’t listen to him reading every day, without fail, from the book sent home from school.
– It’s because the family home has few or no books.
– You failed to ”treat your baby as a meaning maker from birth and share stories of joy.” (Ewing R. 2018)
– He’s inherited your family’s dyslexia genes.
– It’s because English is her second/additional language.
– It’s because of his ”medical difficulties – constipation, anaemia, poor diet etc.”
Note that all these excuses place the source of the problem with(in) the child or with their parent/s.
”We need to be outraged at this failure to teach and insouciant parent blame. It’s not your fault. It’s not within him. It’s inadequate teaching.”
(Lisa Jeffery. Twitter/X)
Galen Alessi, a Professor of Psychology, conducted a fascinating study on school psychologists (Alessi. 1988). He asked 50 school psychologists to list the causes of the learning difficulties of about 5,000 students. The results of these 5,000 reports prepared by the school psychologists, ”indicated clearly no need to improve curricula, teaching practices, nor school administrative practices and management. The only needs somehow involve improving the stock of children enrolled in the system, and some of their parents…After examining several “mainstream” school psychology texts, Alessi found that when assessing children’s reading problems, school factors were mentioned as a factor between 7% and 0% (zero) of the time. “Child factors” were held responsible for reading problems between 90% to 100% of the time.”
(The Blame Game! Are School Problems the Kids’ Fault? Pamela Darr Wright. Wrightslaw.com)
”Wade and Moore asked teachers the question, “Who is to blame for students’ failure to learn?” That 65% of teachers blamed child characteristics, and 32% of teachers blamed the home situation would probably be a surprise to those parents who view schools as the major influence on learning. Only 3% of teachers blamed teachers or the school system for learning problems.”
(Hempenstall. Blog: Failure to learn: causes and consequences. NIFDI.org)
Calling time on parent-blame and children’s reading success. Pamela Snow.
http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2023/04/calling-time-on-parent-blame-and.html
Whose Responsibility? Dianne Murphy.
https://thinkingreadingwritings.wpcomstaging.com/2022/02/01/whose-responsibility/
”Sometimes it does seem as if schools will blame anything but the teaching.”
Schools shouldn’t be relying on parents to teach reading. Heather Fearn.
https://heatherfblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/schools-shouldnt-be-relying-on-parents-to-teach-reading/
”There will always be parents that don’t read with their child. It is wrong that schools farm out their core purpose to parents and then wring their hands when children don’t learn to read, blaming their home environment or the child themselves.”
Looking Past the Masks. Dianne Murphy.
https://thinkingreadingwritings.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/looking-past-the-masks/
How inadequate teaching morphs into other problems over time.
”It’s easy to mistake symptoms for causes”.
Literacy skills seem to fuel literacy enjoyment, rather than vice versa.
van Bergen et al. 2022.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/desc.13325
– ”The best-fitting direction-of-causation model showed that skills impacted enjoyment, while the influence in the other direction was zero.”
– “Importantly, the present results suggest that it is the children’s reading ability that determines how much they choose to read, rather than vice versa.”
A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relations Between Motivation and Reading Achievement for K–12 Students. Toste J. R. et al. 2020.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654320919352?journalCode=rera
There is a reciprocal relationship between motivation and reading, but early reading has a stronger impact on motivation than vice versa.
Phonics Teaching in England:
Reception Year (age 4-5) / Key Stage 1 (Y1/Y2 age 5-7):
Some of the DfE-validated SSP programmes are designed to teach a much reduced number of the 176 common GPCs and provide content to cover the first two years (Reception/Y1) of daily SSP lessons**. Schools using these programmes are more likely to drop all daily phonics lessons at the end of Y1, once the phonics check has taken place. This leaves around 100 of the common extended/advanced code GPCs untaught and polysyllabic word decoding and spelling abandoned. The Reading Ape rightly asks ”So when do they learn the extended code or move onto decoding at the polysyllabic level?” (The Reading Ape Blog: Phonics in KS2 – The ‘later’ catastrophe).
In schools that teach decoding and spelling using a two-year SSP programme and/or stop phonics teaching at the end of Y1**, children must discover the rest of the common code for themselves in the context of reading. Rapid learners will begin bootstrapping (self-teaching using ‘implicit statistical learning’. Seidenberg. 2023) within the first two years of high-quality phonics instruction, but the majority of children (70% -see The Reading Ape’s blog ‘Phonics in KS2 – The ‘later’ catastrophe’) need another year, at least, of daily, direct and systematic instruction to master English phonics decoding. All children in Y2 and KS2 benefit from continuing with extended code phonics, along with etymology and morphology, to support their polysyllabic word decoding, spelling and vocabulary.
**”Direct, focused phonics” teaching should take place ”every day in Reception and key stage 1” (Ofsted. 2019).
How long should we teach phonics? Ann Sullivan.
https://www.phonicsforpupilswithspecialeducationalneeds.com/post/how-long-should-we-teach-phonics
”We need to jettison the idea that phonics should be done and dusted for all children in 2 years and if they haven’t succeeded in that timescale then it’s not worth pursuing.”
”I do think that all children should be taught all c.176. Some, of course, will bootstrap themselves for reading after learning, say, 140 or so; but, for spelling, even the bootstrappers need them all with plenty of practice given at every stage.”
(John Walker. Twitter/X)
A headteacher, whose school used a two-year SSP programme, wondered why, despite achieving excellent scores in the Y1 PSC, his school struggled ”to transfer them into fluent spelling and reading as the children progressed”. Linguistic phonics trainer Charlotte MacKechnie explained:
– A score of 32 or a score of 40/40 are both reported as a pass, but a child scoring 32 can get by with just Phase 2 & 3 code knowledge (i.e. what is commonly taught in Reception). Passing PSC ≠ ‘knowing phonics’.
– The PSC includes only four 2-syllable words – 80% of the English language is polysyllabic. Children need to be taught to deal with 2-6 syllable words through phonics teaching in KS1+.
– Children may have been taught well enough in Reception and Year 1, but there hasn’t been enough time to cover the whole code by the end of Year 1! They need at least an additional year for enough deliberate practice to commit sound-spelling correspondences to memory.
Key Stage 2 (Y3 ->Y6 age 8 -11):
Phonics in KS2 – The ‘later’ catastrophe. The Reading Ape.
https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2017/10/27/phonics-in-ks2-the-later-catastrophe
”In a recent research study, every child in years 3, 4 and 5 across 7 schools was screened using the Bryant phonic awareness test. And how many had mastered decoding? 30%!
So 70% of the 8,9 and 10 year-olds had not mastered decoding. That’s 70% of children who will never learn to read properly. Now extrapolate that across the country.”
Base camp. John Walker.
https://theliteracyblog.com/2021/11/28/base-camp/
”When students arrive in Year 3, never having had the foundations properly established, where on earth do teachers, untrained in teaching phonics, even begin to try and teach the statutory spellings? This is not to mention all the other words on a never-ending curriculum list, especially when there is nothing to link any of the words other than meaning?”
”The Rose Review (2006) of the teaching of early reading noted that there was an imperative to improve the professional knowledge and skills of teachers with a focus on Initial Teacher Training. This training was understandably concentrated on those entering the profession and those teaching in the lower primary years but as for many (Chew, 2018), for teachers in upper KS2, there was no additional training, and we continued teaching according to the ‘Searchlights’ model.”
(The Reading Ape)
Phonics Across the Curriculum. John Walker.
https://theliteracyblog.com/2016/07/20/phonics-across-the-curriculum/
”(T)he English orthographic code is complex to the degree that even into Key Stage 2, pupils need plenty of deliberate practice and explicit instruction. To read, never mind, spell words from the government’s recommended list, such as ‘mischievous’, ‘pronunciation’, ‘rhythm’ and ‘sufficient’, phonics is key.”
Ofsted School Inspection (England) and the School SENCos’ Role:
Ofsted inspections taking place in England’s state primary schools since 2019 include an Early Reading (and Phonics) Deep Dive**. School inspectors look closely at how well the school teaches children to read from the beginning of Reception. See ‘Evaluating early reading on graded inspections’ in the School Inspection Handbook (updated 2024) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-inspection-handbook-eif/school-inspection-handbook-for-september-2023
**Update: Ofsted will no longer include early reading deep dives in ungraded inspections starting in September 2024. This move will affect 40% of all school inspections.
Parents are likely to be a child’s best, sometimes only advocates. If your child is still struggling with decoding at the end of year one (this should be flagged up by the phonics screening check), talk to your child’s teacher and/or the school’s SENCo (special educational needs co-ordinator) as soon as possible to find out exactly what the school has put in place to help your child catch-up and keep-up.
Keep-Up and Catch-Up Phonics Intervention:
https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/options-for-intervention/
Caution is strongly recommended. Teachers, SENCos and parents who take advice from one of the dyslexia organisations may believe, incorrectly, that children who are slower than their peers to learn phonics need ”alternative teaching methods” such as ”onset-rime, syllable, and rhythm-based instructional approaches, as phonics doesn’t work for some children” (APPG on Dyslexia. 2021). In addition, some SENCos are still providing non-systematic word-guessing interventions (see ‘Room 101’ for interventions to avoid). All the scientific evidence shows that his type of intervention, whether 1-1 or small-group, will not help a child learn how to decode and spell accurately in the long-term.
”Teachers may attribute weaknesses in reading to a pupil having dyslexia rather than having gaps in their phonic knowledge. This can also lead to teachers using reading interventions that have an alternative approach rather than teaching systematic synthetic phonics. However, reading requires the same phonic knowledge for all children. Teachers can help pupils overcome difficulties by ensuring that they learn GPCs; pupils with SEND are highly likely to need much more frequent repetition.”
(Ofsted. Research Review Series. English. 2022)
Are Accommodations Helpful for those with Decoding Difficulties?
Various accommodations may be put in place by the school’s SENCo. These are often little more than sops for a child’s parents and will usually be limited to the least expensive and simple to deliver, hence the ubiquitous colour-tinted paper, overlays and assistive technology.
”Accommodations can not come at the expense of teaching children to read. Audiobooks or speech-to-text apps for writing, while great tools, should not be a replacement for teaching children to read.”
(Orly Klapholz)
How assistive technology masks the problem of early reading difficulties:
https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2021/12/16/how-assistive-technology-masks-the-problem-of-early-reading-difficulties.html
”Utilizing assistive technology (AT) enables struggling readers to cope, but, as a substitute for effective instruction, it can become a crutch, with longer-term consequences.”
”Assistive tech. is not an acceptable replacement for being able to read. It’s a bandaid for a system-wide problem – poor early reading instruction” (Parent of a teenage struggling reader. Twitter/X)
Should I Have My Child Assessed for Dyslexia?
At a late stage, often only as a result of parental pressure, when the school’s intervention is proving ineffective and a child is continuing to have serious difficulties learning to decode and spell, the school may bring in an LA (local authority) educational psychologist (EP) to assess the child. Note that LA psychologists, ”…work within a public service ethos in which fairness to all potential clients is actively pursued, but in which it is widely believed that it is also unethical to publicly ”raise expectations” above what the LA or school can deliver” (Bunn. SEN magazine. 54). Parents with the financial means may arrange for their child to see an independent EP to speed up assessment and diagnosis. They will charge a hefty (£400+) professional fee for their services.
External evaluations for dyslexia: do the data support parent concerns?
Odegard T.N. et al. 2021. Annals of Dyslexia.
”Parents seeking external evaluation do so due to a lack of support in schools. But sadly the reading struggles of their children are the norm and not the exception.”
(Tim Odegard. Twitter/X)
”(M)eeting the needs of pupils with dyslexia does not require a diagnostic label or test.”
(DfE. 2022. How we help schools and colleges support pupils with dyslexia)
”It’s easy to identify a child struggling significantly with decoding – complex tests are not required. Why should families need to spend vast sums before they can access appropriate educational intervention?”
(Prof Elliott. Twitter/X)
Aside from the cost, the problem with assessment for dyslexia is that research has cast serious doubt on the validity of all the past and present diagnostic procedures. For a start, a professional assessment will usually include an intelligence test, despite the fact that using IQ tests as an integral part of diagnosing dyslexia is known to be scientifically flawed: The British Psychological Society (BPS) advise that ”Assessments referring to cognitive test scores within batteries of tests, such as the BAS and WISC, can be informative when pointing to strengths and weaknesses in the individual case. No particular pattern of sub-test scores, however, can be regarded as necessary or sufficient in deciding whether and to what extent learning difficulties can be described as dyslexic.” (BPS 2005 p68). Furthermore, the BPS’ definition of dyslexia, which it simplifies to, ”…marked and persistent problems at the word level of the NLS curricular framework” (BPS 2005 p20) is, the BPS acknowledges, only a ‘working’ definition, not an universally agreed operational one, meaning it cannot be used to make a scientifically valid diagnosis.
“If you’re testing for dyslexia, small numbers of kids get identified and prioritised but massive numbers with similar sorts of problems do not get helped.”
(Prof Elliott)
http://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/3/4/137
Can Intelligence Testing Inform Educational Intervention for Children with Reading Disability?
Elliott & Resing. 2015.
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/literacy/if-a-child-leaves-a-school-unable-to-read-the-school-has-failed/
Reading difficulty is a teaching problem, not an intelligence problem. David Didau.
The Bell Curve Dyslexia Diagnosis:
Nowadays, most educational psychologists and researchers get around the irksome diagnosis problem by saying that dyslexia is not an “all or nothing” phenomenon, something one either has or doesn’t have; dyslexia, they will tell you, is ”best thought of as existing on a continuum from mild to severe, rather than forming a discrete category.” (Rose. 2009 p34). This is the Bell Curve diagnosis -see below:
– ”Dyslexics are children (and later adults) whose reading is at the low end of a normal distribution. Reading skill results from a combination of dimensional factors (that is, ones that vary in degree), yielding a bell-shaped curve. The reading difficulties of the children in the lower tail are severe and require special attention. ‘Dyslexia’ refers to these children.”
(Seidenberg. 2017 p156)
– “People used to think dyslexia was a clear-cut syndrome with signs and syndromes like a medical disease, but it is actually much more like blood pressure – it can range from very low to very high.”
(Prof M. Snowling. TES podcast).
– ”Literacy difficulties exist on a continuum. There is no clear or absolute cut off point where a child can be said to have dyslexia…whether or not to describe a child’s literacy difficulties as dyslexia will be a matter for professional judgement.” (Devon LEA Dyslexia Guidance) or ”an intuitive clinical impression” (Prof Frith quoted in Miles & Miles 1999).
– ”Reading skills fall along a fine-grained continuum, and there is no consensus on where to draw the line in terms of how depressed reading skills must be to be considered dyslexia.”
(Prof. Kilpatrick)
Dyslexia or Dysteachia?
https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Dyslexia-or-Dysteachia.pdf
Louise Spear-Swerling and Robert J. Sternberg explain why ”Identifying [reading disability] is not really like diagnosing a medical ailment, in part because RD identification is not an objective process involving reliable measurements.”
Hugo Kerr rightly describes the Bell Curve diagnosis as ”throwing in the sponge”, and goes on to say ”(I)t is not legitimate to claim that simply because they all find themselves in this bottom 10% they must all share any particular characteristic, let alone all suffer from the same syndrome, without further evidence that this is so. We have no evidence as to why these poor readers are in this group…All we can properly say from contemplation of the bell curve is that they all seem to be poor readers. It is improper to claim more than this on this evidence – especially to claim that membership of the poor readers’ group per se indicates possession of a neurological deficit – indicates that all these people suffer from dyslexia.”
(Kerr. 2008)
”The Rose Report’s definition of dyslexia is exceedingly broad and says that dyslexia is a continuum with no clear cut-off points. The definition is so broad and blurred at the edges that it is difficult to see how it could be useful in any diagnostic sense.”
(HofC. 2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mafVooDom8k
Alison Clarke: Preventing literacy failure and shifting the whole Bell Curve up.
The Response to Intervention (RTI) Dyslexia Diagnosis:
The second method used to identify dyslexia (used alongside or as an alternative to the Bell Curve diagnosis) is based on whether the pupil’s word-level decoding problem has proved, ”resistant to a prolonged and systematic reading intervention” (Elliott & Gibbs 2008 p483). This is the Response to Intervention (RTI) diagnosis. Aside from the fact that teaching all children to decode and spell using a high-quality phonics programme in initial whole-class instruction (alongside rapidly delivered keep-up phonics practice for all the slow learners), is highly effective in avoiding the need for expensive but often ineffective interventions later on, what precisely constitutes a ”high-quality reading intervention” (Elliott. 2020) will not be stated and parents, yet again, will find themselves having to rely on the judgement (opinion or guesswork) of the professional involved.
”Dyslexia does not develop when children begin with a good SSP programme and when children who fall behind are identified early and given extra practice and teaching with SSP in order to keep up. Not a single child in the studies developed severe literacy difficulties.”
(Grant. M. 2014).
”The best intervention is high-quality initial instruction.”
(Decoding Dyslexia Iowa)
Note that specialist dyslexia teaching as described in Jim Rose’s Dyslexia Report 2009 cannot, at present, be considered to provide a ”well founded intervention” as, ”(M)any of the things that specialist dyslexia teachers do have not been the subject of much published research.” (Singleton. 2009. p21) and those few ”results reported from studies in UK specialist [dyslexia] schools and teaching centres would be regarded as disappointing (or even disregarded altogether)” (Singleton. 2009. p74).
”The Response to Intervention [RTI] framework was devised as an alternative to the discredited IQ/Achievement Discrepancy “Model” for the designation of “Learning Disability.” Schools and teachers find the newer “Model” attractive because it takes the “problem kids” out of mainstream instruction while sustaining present instructional practices and maintaining the turf of psychologists and “Special Education” specialists. Parents find it attractive because the children involved are receiving increased personal and specialized instructional attention. By the time a child has gone through Tier 3, the child, parents, and school personnel are thoroughly convinced that the child has a “disability.” The tragedy/travesty is that the “problem” the child had when first identified as “at risk” has morphed into a “really big problem” for which the child bears the full responsibility.”
(Schutz. May 2011)
”I think many do not understand RTI, specifically the need for Tier 2 to intensify good practice from Tier 1. Even a sound Tier 2 program won’t help if Tier 1 is based on ineffective practices such as balanced literacy.”
(Dr. Kate de Bruin. Twitter/X)
Because of their inability to give a legitimate (scientifically-based) diagnosis of dyslexia (no universally agreed operational definition exists – or a legal definition in the UK-see Singleton. 2009. p16), a specialist dyslexia teacher or educational psychologist’s written report is unlikely to include the discrete label. Instead, it will substitute words such as, ”has a specific weakness in phonological development”, ”has deficits in phonological awareness”, or it will be hedged about with words that avoid commitment to a definitive diagnosis: ”literacy difficulties follow the pattern of an SpLD known as dyslexia”, ”has dyslexic traits” or, ”is at risk for Dyslexia-SpLD”, with the clear cut dyslexia label only given to parents verbally.
”Getting the right help to all children who need it – rather than spending time and money separating off “dyslexic” children and giving them expensive but often dubious assistance – should now be a national priority. But it is not.”
(Mills D. 2007)
After criticism of her comments in the Channel 4 TV documentary The Dyslexia Myth (2005), where she seemed to suggest otherwise, Professor Snowling declared that educated professionals can readily identify ‘dyslexia’. Presumably, being aware that there is no way this can be done legitimately without an operational definition, she added, ”It is no longer relevant to ask ‘who is dyslexic and who is not.” Professors Stanovich and Elliott were more straightforward:
– ”The underlying difficulty appears to be the same, the way these children respond to treatment appears to be the same, there appears to be no justification whatsoever for going in and trying to carve out a special group of poor readers. This is what 15 years of research, all over the world has shown can’t be justified on a scientific or empirical basis.”
(Stanovich quoted in Mills. D. 2005).
– ”After three decades as an educationalist, first as a teacher of children with learning difficulties, then as an educational psychologist and, latterly, as an academic who has reviewed the educational literature, I have little confidence in myself (or others’) ability to offer a diagnosis of dyslexia.”
(Elliott. The Dyslexia Myth. 2005)
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-elliott-dyslexia-diagnosis_us_5aa83c91e4b001c8bf14aa07
By Focusing On Dyslexia, We Ignore Other Struggling Readers. Elliott. J. 2018.
”Dyslexia is the excuse that absolves educators of responsibility – in fact, I believe it to be the opium of education.”
(Anne Glennie)
The Dyslexia Label:
A chartered LEA psychologist commented: ”Unfortunately people want a dyslexia label as they think it offers an explanation and often the label is useful as it releases extra funding and special arrangements for exams. I avoid the term, referring instead to the specific gaps in code knowledge and the need for extra teaching to learn the basic or advanced code, practice with blending, and segmenting, the need for modelled writing where children compose sentences orally first, the need to develop accurate letter formation through handwriting teaching and practice. Now we have identified these gaps and weak areas, I say to schools and parents, we can focus extra teaching on them. Schools and parents would be much happier, I suspect, if I just were to say with a long face, “It’s dyslexia!!!”. It’s not an easy position to defend – there is an LEA specialist advisory teacher for dyslexia and dyslexia-friendly courses all about overlays, coloured paper, and special arrangements for accessing the curriculum, using scribes and readers and ICT.”
”In actuality, the dyslexia label is most likely to be applied, not to more worthy, or more unfortunate, individuals, but rather to those whose families have the drive – and, in many cases, the financial means – to gain access to a diagnostician.” (Elliott. 2019)
Parents need to ask themselves if it is wise to spend a great deal of time, effort and usually money, to get their child professionally labelled as ‘dyslexic’, when there is no clear science behind its identification. More importantly, obtaining the label does not guarantee that their child will, as a consequence, receive in-school tuition, where a teacher uses a high-quality phonics (intervention) programme to remediate their child’s decoding and spelling difficulties.
Another negative result of obtaining the dyslexia label for a child is that many classroom teachers find the label intimidating. They have been led to believe that those with the label have biologically determined and incurable decoding difficulties. After receiving the diagnosis of dyslexia from an ‘educated professional’, the child is likely to be assigned by their teachers to the ‘can’t be taught to read or spell’ category.
Does the ‘dyslexia’ label disable teachers?
Elliott & Gibbs. 2015.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107204601.htm
”(T)he label ‘dyslexia’ evoked responses that suggested it was seen as a fixed disability, and that the teachers believed their ability to help children with ‘dyslexia was unlikely to develop over time.”
The impact of the dyslexia label on academic outlook and aspirations
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bjep.12408
”The results show that those labelled with dyslexia hold lower beliefs about their ability in English and Maths than their matched peers without this label. The children labelled with dyslexia were also significantly less likely to say that they would go to university. Furthermore, teachers and parents held lower aspirations for children labelled with dyslexia.”
”Once he had the label, the form teachers ALL washed their hands of him. It validated that ‘A’ was unteachable.”
(Katherine W, parent of a struggling reader)
”Diagnosis for us was a waste of time and money. The school continued on exactly the same path – unable/unwilling to help beyond tokenism in the classroom – diagnosis gave them the excuse they were looking for to give up as dyslexics ‘cannot be taught to read.’’
(Amanda, parent of a struggling reader)
Possession of the dyslexia label can make parents more vulnerable to the purveyors of snake oil cures:
”(W)hen a child has problems, parents often feel guilty, and they can to some extent assuage that guilt by doing something. So alternative interventions are especially likely to be taken up in situations where the mainstream options are seen as ineffective and parents feel powerless to make a difference” (Bishop. 2008). And, once they’ve gone to all the trouble and expense of obtaining the label, parents and students may be very reluctant to discard it, even if new information comes along which might make them question its legitimacy and usefulness:
”There’s a psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance which is the tendency to filter out information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one’s beliefs. In the context of intervention, it is uncomfortable to conclude that one put a lot of time and money into a treatment that has not worked. There is likely, therefore, to be a cognitive bias to paint as bright a picture as possible. This seems supported by studies that find a mismatch between people’s perceptions of efficacy and objective evidence.” (Bishop D. 2008)
”The belief that some children cannot learn to decode is toxic.”
(David Didau. Twitter/X)
Hugo Kerr offers other important reasons to avoid the ‘dyslexia’ label:
”Firstly, much thinking about dyslexia is almost willfully sloppy and sloppy science never did anyone any good, very particularly the subjects of it… Many diagnoses stand on small, highly controversial and rather subjectively assessed, evidence. And then, people given a diagnosis of a neurological deficit may find such a label at the least disconcerting, at worst devastating… And then, what about those who don’t achieve the label? Are they simply (and publicly) to be designated as stupid? And then, we don’t appear able to see over or around dyslexia; once the diagnosis has been invoked we seek no other explanations for presenting phenomena. Simpler, alternative, much more everyday, scientifically duller, less sexy (and much less lucrative) explanations are very much less assiduously sought once a diagnosis of ‘dyslexia’ has been made”
(Kerr H. 2008)
The Dyslexia Debate: life without the label.
Gibbs & Elliott. 2020. Oxford Review of Education.
”In this paper, we discuss the problematic use of the term dyslexia. Noting that there are no unambiguous objective diagnostic criteria for ‘dyslexia’, in part because this term is understood in multiple ways, we discuss its relevance for informing educational assessment, intervention and resourcing. We conclude by highlighting how current approaches to dyslexia diagnosis and remediation typically fail to serve the needs of large numbers of struggling readers.”
Special Educational Needs and Disability tribunals: Dyslexia, scientific validity and equity.
Elliott, Stanbridge & Branigan 2024.
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/berj.4070?domain=p2p_domain&token=PAPMUFEF9WPF6GBAMHS8
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/the-science-of-dyslexia-isnt-as-straightforward-as-politicians-seem-to-think/
The science of dyslexia isn’t as straightforward as politicians seem to think:
”However, Lord Watson tapped into a very considerable body of support from the dyslexia industry and the individuals it purports to help. Illiteracy is intensely shameful, and a diagnosis of dyslexia is a child’s get-out-of-jail-free card. They get attached to their diagnosis, rather like the Stockholm syndrome.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/17/battle-over-dyslexia-warwickshire-staffordshire
The Battle Over Dyslexia:
”It was once a widely accepted way of explaining why some children struggled to read and write. But in recent years, some experts have begun to question the existence of dyslexia itself.”
”It’s bonkers when parents have to fight to get their kids stigmatized to receive services that more often than not, do nothing more than lock in the stigma for life.”
(Prof Dick Schutz)
Decoding and Spelling Assessments:
http://www.thelearningzoo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Phonics-Forever-Simple-View-of-Reading-Key.pdf
This flowchart is based on The Simple View of Reading. It will help you identify whether a child is struggling with decoding, comprehension – or both.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum-assessments-practice-materials#phonics-screening-check
Free copies of the DfE’s past phonics screening check (PSC) materials. Quick and easy to do. Independent researchers found England’s Y1 phonics check to be a ”valid measure of phonic skills and sensitive to identifying children at risk of reading difficulties” (Duff, Snowling et al. 2014) N.B. The check examines a child’s elementary alphabet code knowledge (at the end of Y1 most of the common extended code still remains to be taught) along with segmenting and blending skills.
Free, low-frequency word spelling test. Alison Clarke.
https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2018/01/low-frequency-word-spelling-test/
”Free, low-frequency word spelling test which you can download here and use to explore learners’ spelling skills and knowledge. It’s not a standardised test, so won’t tell you whether a learner’s spelling skills are behind, on a par with or ahead of peers. Its purpose is to focus your attention on the things that matter most for spelling.”
https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Ruth-Miskins-Nonsense-word-test-RRF-newsletter-50.pdf
Ruth Miskin’s free, nonsense word test. This is a phonics decoding ability test.
https://www.banterspeech.com.au/is-your-kindy-kid-really-reading-find-out-with-our-7-free-mini-stories/
”Is your ‘end of Kindy/Reception’ kid really reading? Seven free mini-stories using basic/simple code and no pictures or repetitive language, for parents to check if their child can decode accurately without guessing.”
https://literacyhub.edu.au/families/phonics-check-for-families.html
The Literacy Hub, including a free Phonics Check for families to use at home, is an Australian Government initiative to develop tools to gauge and support Year 1 students’ phonics skills.
Is your child a good/average reader but a weak speller?
Use a ‘similar-looking word test’ to check whether their word-level reading is subpar.
https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2022/06/similar-looking-word-test/
Book (£) Why Children Can’t Read: and what we can do about it. Diane McGuinness. Pub. Penguin UK (out of print, but copies available through Amazon UK). USA edition (in print) Why Our Children Can’t Read: and what we can do about it. Pub. Simon&Schuster. Both editions include a useful set of assessments: nonsense words, phoneme segmentation/blending and a code knowledge test.