Debate about the value of a dyslexia label has recently resurfaced as Jamie Oliver has launched his campaign to ‘change the system, not the kids’.
This campaign slogan highlights a sense many children who struggle with literacy and their families have that they are written off too soon, not because they don’t have potential, but because the education system is unable to accommodate and recognise diverse strengths and ways of learning.
But how fair is this perception? A recent study we undertook offers some important insights towards answering this question.
The long-term study asked parents of children experiencing literacy difficulties about their experiences of the education system, as well as those of their children.
We wanted to explore their perceptions because parents see the wider impact of literacy difficulties on their children – outside the classroom, over time and across settings.
We also asked school teachers from four different local authority areas about how they supported children who had specific literacy difficulties, as well as how they understood inclusion.
We were interested to explore whether they saw literacy difficulties in the same way, and what role a formal diagnosis of dyslexia played (if any) in the management of literacy difficulties.
Our analysis of these accounts identified 40 factors that impacted whether a child with dyslexia had a positive or negative trajectory through school. We were able to group these into four broad aspects of provision:
- The ability to ‘see’ dyslexia and its impacts.
- The experience of having dyslexia and whether it was acknowledged by the setting.
- The importance of recognising dyslexia as multifaceted, with different areas of strengths and challenges for a child.
- The limits of the usefulness of a formal diagnosis.
Where schools made good use of diagnostic reports, the accounts of parents and teachers suggested better outcomes. However, one of our key conclusions is that many schools do not.
Teachers’ knowledge of dyslexia is patchy and binary
In fact, our findings suggest that dyslexia is relatively invisible in schools and that there is confusion between accommodations that might allow immediate access to content and interventions that address underlying difficulties.
Among our respondents, teachers’ knowledge of dyslexia and how to support the barriers arising from the profile was patchy and binary.
This leads to a second problem: between the ages of five and 16, children’s access to education is variable year-on-year. As a result, learning and skills gaps open up that worsen over time.
Given these challenges, it is perhaps unsurprising that, while teachers in our cohort were invested in children’s progress, they often reported having no plan B when that progress was slow or absent.
Where they might have found a plan B is in collaborating with parents. Indeed, we found that they held important information that could be mobilised not just to benefit their child but also others with SEND.
Sadly, parents often reported being ignored – a commonly missed opportunity to enhance teacher effectiveness.
Having said that, we also found that parents do not necessarily appreciate the extraordinary demands placed on teachers.
Together, these findings suggest that poor home-school communication can be a significant barrier to children’s learning, compounding the limited use of diagnostic information.
Indeed, a key finding of our research is that the transfer of child-relevant information about needs and what works in meeting them is too often inadequate.
More positively, we also found strong evidence that good communication between teachers and parents noticeably improves planning and access. And where teachers’ and parents’ understanding of dyslexia itself align best, the account of progress and outcomes is also most positive.
Importantly, parents in our cohort did not see dyslexia as just a problem of reading, or even reading and writing for their children, but one of lost agency and exclusion from their peer group.
Our research concluded that diagnosis is less about labelling and much more about making these difficulties visible. Parents see it as a tool to ensure their children’s needs are met in a holistic sense.
So is a dyslexia diagnosis valuable? What we can say for sure is that, in an imperfect system, it offers a common basis for communication and understanding. And that is undeniably useful.
Your thoughts