How long doe it take to be assessed for dyslexia?

[AngiBolen]

DD (Y2) is being assessed at school. She saw someone last week who asked her to draw a picture of a relative. I'm presuming she will be seen by this person again sometime soon.

Basically I want to know how long it will be before I have a definitive answer.

And who actually does the assessing?

We had a child assessed for dyslexia this week at my school. The SENCO sent the referal of about 3 months ago. The person came and the test took all afternoon. Not sure when the parents get results though.

Apparently this person regularly comes into school to work with one boy "with problems" as DD puts it (behaviour as far as I can tell). And only worked with her from the "the middle of maths until it was time for assembly". Which doesn't give me much to go on. The school have suspected Dyslexia since reception (Y1 teacher thought not) but apparently they look at them in the second week of this term, and if they haven't made any progress, then they start to do something about it. DD has actually made progress, IMO. She's just way behind her peers for reading and writing, but her verbal skills are good, and her maths is average.

We have a thread about dyslexia approx every 2 days, so excuse me if I'm a bit short with you.

But basically a dx of dyslexia won't help your DD at all.

There is absolutely nothing different school will do for a child who is struggling with reading and writing, and a child who has a label of dyslexia.

There is however an awful lot you can do - again a label of dyslexia is not necessary for you to act.

www.dyslexiaadvice.co.uk

I work with 'struggling readers' at KS3. It is my experience that most of the children I have worked with suffer from poor phonics teaching or poor phonics teaching coupled with being slower to learn than the 'average' child.

A very small percentage of these children have significant processing difficulties which make acquisition of reading and spelling skills much more difficult for them, though not impossible.

I would be interested to know what sort of phonics teaching your child has had and whether the school encourages the use of 'other strategies', apart from sounding out and blending, for reading unfamiliar words. The teaching method used makes a huge difference to the acquisition of reading skills for some children.

If you can be confident that your child has had good, rigorous, systematic, structured phonics instruction from the start, and that any interventions to help her have also been based on good instruction, then it may be worth trying to dig further. But, sadly, as IB says, any assessment the school does will tell you very little (dyslexia being the label for a symptom, not a discrete 'condition') and will certainly not identify what is causing the problem...

She won't suddenly magically be able to read then?

Thanks for the link, IndigoBell.

I think I know what her problems are, and are working on them at home. I do think a dx will let future teachers know she's not just thick when she starts a new year, rather than them having to get to know her (and her fabulous talking mouth as she describes it ) first.

No AB - don't use a dx to tell future teachers 'she's not just thick'.

Instead use it to research dyslexia, and cure it. There's loads of info how to do that on my website.

My DD now reads fine (although her writing isn't quite there yet - but is now getting there very, very quickly).

If I can cure my DD anybody can be cured - honestly.

Dyslexia Treatments

Indigo, I wish that was true.
Of course schools should not need labels to give children appropriate help for their needs, but they DO!
DDs school spent 5 years assuming that with a bit of extra help (from IMO a pretty useless TA) her reading and writing problems would disappear.
Only when it became obvious she was going to fail her SATs did they panic.
I'd panicked the week before and booked an independent EdPhsy.
Thus between us we had the evidence to get her a scribe.
This meant no egg on face for school (even though they deserved it) and DD going to senior school with SATs grades relevant to her mental ability
It also meant she's on their SEN register.

I do think a dx will let future teachers know she's not just thick when she starts a new year,

Quite frankly, I think that any teacher who thinks that a child is 'thick' because they have problems with reading needs to be drummed out of the teaching profession!

I have worked with children on the whole spectrum of 'intelligence'! One of the 'brightest' children I have worked with had the most severe difficulty in learning to read.

Any teacher worth their salt should know that the ability to read has a huge influence on the acquisition of what we call 'intelligence' in that the most extensive vocabulary and the most detailed knowledge of a subject can only really be found in written form.

And what is secondary school doing for your dd, startail?

If only that were true startail a label isn't at all helpful unless the teacher knows what to do to support the child.
A label with dyslexia tells me this child has difficulty with reading/writing/both ...great I had worked that out for myself... it doesn't tell me what is the cause of that difficulty or how to help the child progress. I don't need a label to get extra time in the SATs or to get the child a reader or scribe the label isn't important.
A scribe is a plaster over a wound it benefits the school more than the child.

A label isn't needed to place a child on the SEN register either.

'A scribe is a plaster over a wound it benefits the school more than the child'

Yes, and the wound will continue to fester unless the school puts some systematic and evidence-based teaching of reading in place.

Exactly! good teaching is good teaching (for every child) whether a child has a label or not

Your child's normal teacher should be able to tell you

• their knowledge of phonics / the alphabet code, and any difficulties your chaild has in this area.
• their ability to 'track' with their eyes e.g. across a line of text, or a moving circle on a screen etc.
• any unusual letter formation, and any inabilty to discriminate between particular letters.
• Any difficulty in sequencing e.g. inability to follow more than one instruction at a time, or muddling up the order of instructions
• Any difficulties that appear to be to do with hearing e.g. general iniability to hear, inability to discriminate between related sounds, difficulty in hearing the sounds in the middle of words.
• Any fine motor skills issues that seem to be inhibiting writing.

They should also be able to tell you what they have in place to help her in all these areas e.g. daily systematic phonics teaching tailored to her areas of difficulty, tracking exercises to strengthen the eye muscles, handwriting interventions, task boards for sequencing.

[If the normal teacher doesn't do these things, you might want to think about finding a school more experienced in dealing with SEN]

They, with the SENCo, should then be able to point you in the direction of / refer you to specific specialists e.g. a paediatric optometrist for tracking issues, hearing experts, OTs for motor skills issues etc. We do have the 'Learning Support Team' who come in to assess children with SEN, but tbh we're always doing everything they recommend - it is the specific specialists who provide things which actually address the cause of the behaviours than might come under the 'dyslexia' umbrella.

Teacher - great post.

Can you please tell me how a teacher will tell if a child has eye tracking problems? and what your school does for it?

Also do you think this is standard? Or only stuff that some schools do?

(I'm trying to introduce this stuff at my school, which is why I'm trying to find 'teacher friendly' links and resources :) )

teacherwith2kids, I am already aware of DD's problems, re; tracking, sequencing, fine motor skills, not hearing sounds etc. We are working on these things at home, and DD is receiving extra support on school to help her with phonics, etc. I am very happy with what the school are doing to help DD, and although her class teacher is concerned at her lack of progress, I'm not atm.

If you know all of that, a label of dyslexia won't add anything at all. In fact I think it might prove harmful to your DD as teachers might use a dyslexic label as an excuse.

Once again I highly recommend Tinsley House. They fixed DDs (and DSs) eye tracking problems in about 3 weeks. Unreal.

I'd been trying to address all of those problems you mentioned for about a year previously without nearly as much success......

Indigo, I thought that this was standard stuff.. though as we have a very high proportion of children with SEN in the school (between a third and a half of most classes) we are perhaps more practised as we deal with it every day.

One 'organisational' thing which really works well for us is having TAs who work with a class for Literacy and Maths every day but then have specific training to deliver particular interventions for the remainder of the day. So I might pick up what appears to be a tracking issue - and the TA who has had all the training will then do a 1:1 assessment and some simple diagnostic tests (e.g. tracking a moving circle on a screen, scribing over a shape, underlining all the text on a page and circling all the 'l's or 'a's) before either ruling it out or referring on to the SENCo who then refers on to the optometrist. In the meantime, the TA has a number of 'standard' tracking exercises - developments of the diagnostic tests, variations to Write Dance, even a simple one where the child walks along with a torch in each hand, shining the torch at the toe of each foot and looking at it as each foot stapes forward - which she will do with the child until we get the 'tailored' exercises from the optometrist, after which she will do those instead.

We have a TA who specialises in movement issues (does Smart Moves, Write Dance and assorted other things), one who has received extensive training in autism, one who runs a nurture group, one who delivers a particular remedial Maths programme etc, one who has all the 'catch up' reading programmes at her fingertips etc. It means that as a class teacher I have a bank of expertise to draw on without delay - it is my responsibility to pick up any initial problems, to make sure that an IEP is in place, liaise with the SENCo etc and to differentiate all work and support in class to include everyone (for which I have to understand each child's barriers to learning and what can be done to overcome them in a class context) , but I don't also have to deliver all the specialist interventions that might work best to 'close the gap'.

Might that be a model that your school could use?

As a SENCO I have no means of referring children to an optometrist only to recommend a parent seeks help or asking the school nurse to follow up concerns.

teacher this is brilliant. I don't think our SENCO had come across tracking problems before - certainly was unaware of what vision therapy might involve.

That's odd, as our SENCo does so regularly - perhaps different areas?

I will check with the relevant TA tomorrow, but I think that this is one site that she uses for initial assessments and observations of a child's tracking, as well as for 'interim' exrcises until we get the optometrist report:

www.eyecanlearn.com/#Tracking%20Skills

Note, though, that what we do in school is not 'high level vision therapy' - we are not medical or eye specialists which is why we seek guidance from optometrists (though we do commit to delivering any 'ongoing' exercises that the optometrist recommends). However the tracking exercises we do do are at least more useful than just saying 'oh well, we'll scribe for you in tests'!

(And Indigo, I'm sorry if I raised and then lowered your hopes as to what a school might do about tracking issues... I suppose all I can say is that we know about them, we can identify when a child has them, we know who to refer the child on to, and we devote school time to what a specialist might recommend)