Webchat about Dyslexia with Karen Mace from British Dyslexia Association - Wednesday 3 October, 9pm

[RachelMumsnet]

Dyslexia Awareness Week runs from Monday 1st to Sunday 7 October and we’ve organised a webchat with Karen Mace, Head of Assessments and Professional Level Training at the British Dyslexia Association on Wednesday 3 October between 9 and 10pm.

Kate Mace is a qualified specialist teacher and assessor for dyslexia. She has 25-years teaching experience, including four years as a deputy headteacher and seven years as a special educational needs co-ordinator.

Dyslexia Awareness Week will run from today until Sunday 7 October and this year the focus is on 21st century dyslexia. The week, organised by the British Dyslexia Association, will include activities in classrooms, workplaces and online (using the hashtag #21stcenturydyslexia), competitions and much more. Helen Boden, CEO of the British Dyslexia Association said: “For too long, dyslexia has been seen as a negative associated only with difficulties reading and writing. For this year’s Dyslexia Awareness Week, we are focusing on 21st century dyslexia. We will be holding events, training and competitions looking at the massive advances in understanding of dyslexia, including the benefits it brings, and technology to support those identified as dyslexic.”

If you’d like to join the discussion, or have questions you’d like to put to Karen, please join us here - or if you're unable to join us at this time, post questions for Karen in advance on this thread.

@UnderMajorDomoMinor

I love your work. I know you work with people as role models. It’d be great to draw more of these from a wide range of work places. I was never going to be an actress or sports person but I do a good senior public sector job - when I was younger I would have thought this work was out of reach to a dyslexic like me.

This is lovely to hear! Something I always put in my assessment reports is for parents to introduce their child to role models in areas they are interested in such as sport or acting. Dyslexia shouldn’t be a barrier to success in life, it is finding your niche that is important and finding compensatory strategies. Many people with dyslexia have to work much harder than their peers to succeed but appreciate their success more because of the hard work.

@Tracytoby

My 10 year old has recently been screened by the school (after years of me lobbying) and I am seeking a formal assessment via the BDA and paying for this. I have asked the school to complete their sections on the form to enable a formal assessment. What are the legal obligations for the school to act upon this formal assessment? My 10 year old is in primary moving to secondary next year. Also Are any legal obligations on the institutions the same? Grateful for advice on how formal assessment interacts with the educational system.

There are no legal obligations for the school to complete their section but it is helpful to ascertain their views. We can still do the assessment without their view.

@InProgress

At age 8 my son (now 10) was tested for dyslexia within his primary school and they found his working memory is very good (80th percentile) but his processing capability at that time is 3-4th percentile.

He did not get a dyslexia or specific learning difficulty diagnosis despite his results. Should this difficulty be under the dyslexia umbrella and is there anything you would recommend to support him?

Slow speed of processing is part of a dyslexia diagnosis, however it was the only area of weakness a diagnosis would not be given as to give a diagnosis weaknesses would have to be seen in other areas such as phonological awareness, working and short-term memory. If there is adequate evidence, we may give a diagnosis of a specific learning difficulty (slow processing).

Slow processing can be supported in many ways such as:

Ensure staff are aware X has a slow processing speed and make allowances for this. Given their slow processing speed, they will need additional time to complete tasks such as:
➢ Copying down information
➢ Taking notes
➢ Homework (they might need the amount of homework reducing)
➢ Completing assessments, tests and exams

@stripyeyes

Hi My daughter age 8 (year 4) was diagnosed as dyslexic over the summer. School are on board with following recommendations made but can't really do much 1:1 work. How crucial do you think a private tutor is at this stage? Thanks

My view is that if you can afford a private tutor and your daughter is willing to go to tutoring then go for it. State schools and the LEAs simply don't have adequate funds to support all SEN children.

@Rainbowshine

I ‘d like to ask what the BDA plan to do to educate educators and others about dysgraphia? It feels like the poor relation compared to the other “dys’s” sometimes 🙁. Thanks, will be excited to see the chat.

Dysgraphia does not currently have an agreed diagnosing definition and therefore an assessor would identify difficulties with fine motor skills and refer on to an Occupational Therapist for further investigation. I think this area needs a lot more research and focus, as you rightly say it is considered to be one of the ‘dys’s’ (Greek for ‘bad’) but currently the three specific learning difficulties are dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia.

@AdultHumanFemale

DD1 (aged 8) was assessed by an independent EdPsych this year as having dyslexia and dyscalculia following a basic screening by school's SENCO; working memory and processing being massively flagged. She has developed intense math anxiety on account of her dyscalculia. Otherwise she fits the 'creative dyslexic' type so frequently spoken of, and her writing, on a sentence and text level, has been commended. My question is, will we ever be able to make a difference to her retention of spelling of high frequency words, number bonds and times tables? We have done hours of Nessy every week over the last few years (which she enjoys, and which has had some impact -thanks, school, for the subscription!), as well as lots of practise of said spellings, number bonds and times tables. She's beginning to feel deflated and disspirited. Or should we just seek out technology to help her, accepting that she may never be able to retain this kind of information? I just want her to be happy.

It sounds like you and the school have worked very well together for the good of your daughter which is great to here. I think there is probably a limit to how much some learners can retain. Memory in our field is often described as a shelf so if you put one thing on one end something else might fall off the other side. Whilst overlearning is a good strategy and works for some, ultimately you want her to have strategies that work for her and her to be happy so using the multitude of technology that is out there is sensible.

@LARLARLAND

I would like to echo Rainbowshine’s question in respect of dyscalculia. In my experience teachers do not have a clue how to spitbitborbhow to teach children with a diagnosis. They are however quick to tell these children they are ‘not trying hard enough’ or that they are ‘not academic.’

Dyscalculia is where dyslexia was 10 years ago, there is not an agreed diagnosing definition but we are very close to one. At the BDA we are very near to being able to offer a full assessment for dyscalculia and I expect to have this in place in the next 12-18 months. We have agreed our definition for dyscalculia as:

Development dyscalculia is a specific and persistent difficulty in understanding arithmetic and basic number sense. It may also affect retrieval of number facts and key procedures, fluent calculation and interpreting numerical information. It is diverse in character and occurs across all ages and abilities. Dyscalculia is an unexpected difficulty in Maths that cannot be explained by external factors.

Mathematic difficulties are often thought of as a continuum, not a distinct category, with dyscalculia at the extreme end of this continuum. It should be expected that developmental dyscalculia will be distinguishable from general maths difficulties due to the severity of difficulties with symbolic and non-symbolic magnitude, number sense and subitising.
Developmental dyscalculia can often co-occur with other specific learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

It is very distinct from dyslexia as it is very much number based, as opposed to letters.

Good evening, I have a severe visual impairment and I am over 18. I was not educated in the UK, so I was not tested for dyslexia although it is suspected I have it. Trying to find somewhere to do an assessmentprivately has been quite difficult to do. Do you know anywhere that might know how to apssess somebody with a severe visual impairment and how would assessment be done? I also have a lot of trouble reading braille . I can't process what I am reading and many times I will flip the letters around . In the past, it has been mistaken that for my visual impairment, I can also read large print. But I have the same difficulties in braille and it has led to me being knocked off of my Uni foundation degree among other things. Can dyslexic students also request to do things orally instead of written?

@MyFavouriteWasteOfTime

What is being done to educate employers to help adults in the workplace?

Do you think it is possible to learn enough strategies to reverse a diagnosis?

Do you think the high number of pedants on online forums are contributing to the problem of lacking awareness and support? Is there away to help people post without the SPAG police having a field day?

We do a lot of training in the workplace and all employers should be ensuring diversity is being addressed in the workplace. We also offer a workplace needs assessment that employers can organise if they have a dyslexic employee to advise on adjustments to their work to support them.

I don't think you can reverse the diagnosis but you can certainly improve in areas through sustained intervention and by finding strategies that work for you.

I am not sure I understand your last comment, sorry!

I showed one of my kids a couple of the videos from the British Dyslexia Association's youtube (particularly liked the tips video as she could see others doing similar to what she does and new ideas).

What would you recommend are good ways to find and test out strategies for kids not getting support in school?

@Fanwah

Id like to echo the questions on maths and dysgraphia. And also the one on educating educators. My son has had a soul crushing time at school and is now home educated and not very happy about it. At secondary level the 'support' for him took the form of someone following him about most of thr day and checking in on him, about which he was mortified and resentful. We didnt even realise why at the time but it can be briefly explained as deeply unhelpful for burgeoning social anxiety. Poor kid.

I am so sorry to hear of your son’s experience, school’s are doing the best they can with the resources they have which as I am sure you have heard in the press are being squashed further and further. The losers in this are those with additional needs, it isn’t right and things do need to change.

Thank you for your response. It is worrying that children with dyscalculia have a condition which is 10 years behind dyslexia.

@blue25

Why do you think a dyslexia diagnosis is helpful for children? We have a whole range of pupils being 'diagnosed' with dyslexia, but they all have very different needs. This makes the label or diagnosis meaningless for us. Each child needs their own individualised plan for e.g. Phonics, spelling, memory. Lumping all these children with the same diagnosis is at best useless and at worst harmful, as others will make incorrect assumptions about the child based on the label e.g. they can't read.

Personally I have always felt that a label is only as good as the support it accesses. So if we know someone has dyslexia we know how to help them more effectively and who to contact for support. It is useful for accessing DSA (Disabled Student Support) and University and without the diagnosis the support can't be accessed. As I have covered in another post I think the assessment process can be very helpful in helping individuals understand their strengths and challenges. Often I am able to tell children that they are 'as bright and able as all their friends but that they have difficulties in areas that their friends don't.' To ensure they can perform as well as their peers we need to find ways to help them.

Dyslexia is a spectrum condition so it can range from mild to severe so just because you have a diagnosis it doesn't mean your dyslexia is going to be the same as someone else's.

@MollyHuaCha

Once he was officially declared dyslexic-dysgraphic-dyspraxic, teachers seemed more willing to accept that DS was actually trying, but no one actually gave him any help or additional support, despite the recommendations in the report.

Luckily we could afford years of private tutors who made an enormous difference.

In all we paid for three assessments - age 8, pre GCSE, pre A level which cost £1300.

The only tangible benefit from the diagnosis has been extra exam time.

So my question is, what is the actual purpose of official assessment?

Here is an extract from an article I wrote on children’s assessments for our BDA annual handbook, I hope this is helpful in answering your questions:

Dyslexia Assessments for Children
Have you thought about booking a full diagnostic assessment for dyslexia for your child? Difficulties with reading, writing and spelling are the most common reasons a parent would be alerted to book an assessment. However, they may have also noticed their child is becoming disillusioned with school, is finding school harder than their peers or appears verbally able and articulate but can’t get what they want to say down on paper. A parent might also notice difficulties with processing information or just have a gut feeling that something isn’t right and that their child isn’t performing as well as they could be. What a parent doesn’t normally refer for is to find out their child’s strengths, however often following an assessment they will have a very good understanding of these and how they can harness them to support their difficulties.

A diagnostic assessment is the only way to really understand if your child has dyslexia and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Let’s start with those strengths as believe it or not many children (and parents) come out of an assessment full of confidence having found out what they are good at. This is the feedback from the parent of a child, I recently assessed, ‘I left the assessment with gratitude for the support and advice I had received, my son left the assessment with his head held high and with a boost to his self-esteem’.

The assessment process – believe it or not – is actually quite an enjoyable process. I think the reason for this is the assessment is very varied in delivery, most tasks are short and there is a multi-sensory element to them in terms of some practical, visual and auditory tasks as well as the necessary reading, writing and spelling. The full assessment takes approx. 2.5 hours. One aspect of the process that children often get a boost from is finding out how their underlying ability compares to their peers. This can be particularly rewarding if they are found to be on a par or indeed above their peers as often learners with dyslexia can feel like they aren’t performing as well as their classmates and often consider themselves to be in the lower groups (even though they know they are more capable than the group they may be working with in class!).

Knowing whether a child has dyslexia or not empowers the parents as it enables them to understand their child’s needs. They can then find support and work in partnership with the school to support their weaknesses. Sometimes these recommendations can come across as quite generic, that is because we are making general recommendations of what we know works in supporting those difficulties but it is up to the school and the parents to make the final decisions about what to try next.

In a typical assessment the assessor will put the child at ease and often discuss their interests and hobbies and where the child perceives themselves to be doing well or needing extra support. Prior to the assessment the assessor will have looked at the background information and decided on the tests to use. This will usually be along the lines of tests of underlying ability which are a mixture of verbal and visual tasks with a practical element included. There will be some single word reading both timed and untimed, reading of non-words is usually included as well as reading comprehension. There is an assessment of spelling ability using single words as well as within a longer piece of writing where we can also assess handwriting, punctuation, grammar and organisation. We test phonological awareness, phonological memory and rapid naming as well as working memory. There may also be tests of visual processing as well as identification of whether any visual stress is present. At the end of the assessment the assessor will have a good idea of whether there is dyslexia present or not and what the strengths and weaknesses are but will want to go away and score up the tests and make comparisons between them before making a final judgement in their full report.

@LARLARLAND

Thank you for your response. It is worrying that children with dyscalculia have a condition which is 10 years behind dyslexia.

When I say 10 years behind I mean in our understanding of the condition and an agreed diagnosing criteria but I feel we are very close to getting there. Watch the BDA website for more info on this.

Thank you for your response

@DN4GeekinDerby

I showed one of my kids a couple of the videos from the British Dyslexia Association's youtube (particularly liked the tips video as she could see others doing similar to what she does and new ideas).

What would you recommend are good ways to find and test out strategies for kids not getting support in school?

Hi, I am not entirely sure what you are asking - can you clarify?

@windysocks

I would like to know whats the difference between assessment for dyslexia by a psychologist or a specialist teacher? my ds is 10 school reluctant to assess but Dh has severe dyslexic traits ( never diagnosed) but has had massive negative impact on his adult life - he is currently on anti depressants. what is best way to go about getting an assessment? possibly for both? x

A specialist teacher is an expert in teaching, a psychologist is an expert in testing. They will both assess for dyslexia using similar but not exactly the same tests. Psychologists have access to a few extra tests. If the report is to be used for legal reasons we would advise using a psychologist as they carry a bit more legal weight or if you feel there are significantly co-occurring difficulties such as Autism or ADHD. Having said that though, they can’t diagnose either of these conditions and just as a specialist teacher does, will refer on to another professional.

@hellokittymania

Good evening, I have a severe visual impairment and I am over 18. I was not educated in the UK, so I was not tested for dyslexia although it is suspected I have it. Trying to find somewhere to do an assessmentprivately has been quite difficult to do. Do you know anywhere that might know how to apssess somebody with a severe visual impairment and how would assessment be done? I also have a lot of trouble reading braille . I can't process what I am reading and many times I will flip the letters around . In the past, it has been mistaken that for my visual impairment, I can also read large print. But I have the same difficulties in braille and it has led to me being knocked off of my Uni foundation degree among other things. Can dyslexic students also request to do things orally instead of written?

If you contact the assessment service at the BDA we can talk about an assessment for you. I organised an assessment recently for a visually impaired adult.

@KalindaBlack

Hi, do you see a lot of ASD kids with dyslexia? If so what proportion of ASD kids do you see are dyslexic. Thanks

Some, yes – co-occurring difficulties are very common. Assessing a learner with ASD can be challenging to know if their difficulties are due to dyslexia or their Autism but it can be done. I don’t have access to any figures on this I am afraid.

It is unlikely that your daughter’s needs would fall through a full assessment because there are several tests to complete in a range of areas. It should show her to be bright through the visual and verbal underlying ability tests but those score won’t match up with her other scores

Thanks for this encouragement. Obviously I just need to see what the results of the assessment are before worrying about what happens next. My question really arose from whether there are other specific learning difficulties, such as slow processing as mentioned with a PP, that could potentially be diagnosed. If she is not dyslexic, what other ways can she get extra time in exams ( which some teachers have already started giving informally)?

@AdultHumanFemale

Thank you for your response

You are very welcome!

@harveyarnoldrosie

My 10 year old daughter is struggling with anxiety and is on the SEN register with dyslexia. She has moved up to secondary school and is being offered a lot of 'intervention' and even counselling but this is making her more miserable as she believes it's identifying' her as being 'thick'. She is very athletic but is now saying she wants to quit this because she wants to be 'clever' like her peers. (Her younger sister (7) has just been assessed for dyslexia with confirmation that she is too.) I believe that the 'intervention' from first school is key and unfortunately for my eldest this was not available. Do you have any suggestions that could help my daughter at school given that her self esteem is non existent?

Anxiety and impact on self-esteem is very common for learners with dyslexia, they can view themselves negatively and often, unfortunately due to their difficulties with literacy they end up in the lower sets at school. Often these learners have very good verbal ability and know they have the information if they can express it in a way that doesn’t involve pen and paper.

In terms of intervention I would suggest assistive technology would really help her. I believe a personal spell checker is invaluable for learners at secondary school if they struggle with spelling as they can independently check their spelling without drawing attention to themselves. I have also seen ipads used very effectively in secondary schools where learners with dyslexia are able to take a photo of the whiteboard to refer to later in the lesson.

Focus on her strengths and ensure she has plenty of opportunity to show those both in and out of school.

We have an eLearning module on supporting self-esteem you may be interested in accessing as a parent, details are available on our website:

www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/educator/bda-services-educators#E-learning

@Thistly

It is unlikely that your daughter’s needs would fall through a full assessment because there are several tests to complete in a range of areas. It should show her to be bright through the visual and verbal underlying ability tests but those score won’t match up with her other scores

Thanks for this encouragement. Obviously I just need to see what the results of the assessment are before worrying about what happens next. My question really arose from whether there are other specific learning difficulties, such as slow processing as mentioned with a PP, that could potentially be diagnosed. If she is not dyslexic, what other ways can she get extra time in exams ( which some teachers have already started giving informally)?

Yes a diagnosis could be given of a specific learning difficulty such as slow processing. A diagnosis is not needed for extra time in exams. For extra time the school has to do their own access arrangements testing and slow processing is one of the tests. Talk to the school about whether she will be tested as part of their access arrangements. They normally do this at the end of year 10/beginning of year 11 in readiness for GCSEs.

@Wardrobehamster

I know children and adults with dyslexia and they all present. Wet differently. Is there a definition of what dyslexia is?

There are many definitions but the most commonly used in the UK are the BDA definition and the Rose definition:

“Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that mainly affects the development of literacy and language related skills. It is likely to be present at birth and to be lifelong in its effects. It is characterised by difficulties with phonological processing, rapid naming, working memory, processing speed, and the automatic development of skills that may not match up to an individual's other cognitive abilities.
It tends to be resistant to conventional teaching methods, but its effect can be mitigated by appropriately specific intervention, including the application of information technology and supportive counselling.
BDA (2007)

'Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. Characteristic features of dyslexia are difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed. Dyslexia occurs across the range of intellectual abilities. It is best thought of as a continuum, not a distinct category, and there are no clear cut-off points.

Co-occurring difficulties may be seen in aspects of language, motor coordination, mental calculation, concentration and personal organisation, but these are not, by themselves, markers of dyslexia. A good indication of the severity and persistence of dyslexic difficulties can be gained by examining how the individual responds or has responded to well-founded intervention.’
Rose Review (2009)