Special dyslexia schools - returning to mainstream?

[ForPetesSakeNotAgain]

DS (aged 10) has moderate dyslexia (not that I could persuade the ed psych to be so definitive but he reads well and struggles very badly with writing/spelling). A number of specialist schools for dyslexic kids advertise that their aim is to turn the child round in 1-3 years so that they can return to mainstream (provided their dyslexia isn't severe).

Has anyone had any experience of that (either managing to switch back or not being able to)? I do know that many people love their specialist school so much they don't want to switch back but we live overseas and will have to relocate to the UK for the time DS1 is at a specialist school (living apart from DH and DS2 in term time) so it can't be a permanent solution for us.

Any thoughts anyone? Has anyone switched back and if so how did it go?

DS2, who is now 18, did 3 years at a specialist dyslexia school. He did years 3, 4 and 5. Their aim was also to return the kids to mainstream as soon as they were ready. We had to be quite careful about where he went. It needed to be a school which was sensitive to his needs and provided some extra help. The specialist school gave him the foundation to cope with mainstream, that is their job. It teaches them a different way of learning.
He coped well and thrived in a larger environment. He had become more confident in his abilities at the special school.
When he first came out of mainstream I thought he would never access the curriculum at all. In fact when he went back in I still wondered what would happen when he hit GCSEs etc. He uses a lap top in exams and is just about to write his A levels and got 5 offers at Russell Group universities. Taking him out of mainstream for a few years was the best decision we ever made. But do not return your son too quickly, it can take 2-3 years for them to catch up and be ready.

Thanks lazymum. It's great to hear your son is doing so well. I'm a bit nervous about your comment about not rushing back to mainstream as it's a big upheaval for me & ds1 to live thousands of miles from dh & ds2 during term times for even a year. The head of the school we are considering recommended we do it for just a year for the sake of our family but I'm worried we'll get to the end of the year and not feel able to go home. Ds2 is only 6 and so is a bit little to leave for such a long time.

May I ask how bad was your son's dyslexia?

It sounds like you're planning on making a lot of sacrifices to go to this school.

A few too many I think. (moving country without your DH)

Surely for that kind of money you could home school
him for a year and get a specialist dyslexia person to work with him 1:1?

The dyslexia school near me does not get good results because of any magic treaching it does. It gets good ish results, for some pupils, purely because if class sizes and daily 1:1 (or so my friend who works there says)

There must be cheaper, easie and less disruptive ways to get your DS lots of 1:1 teaching.

Certainly I'd want to be clear what makes this school so different that you couldn't replicate it yourself in your own country.

I agree with CalicoRose.

We have to do our best for our children with SN. However, doing our best doesn't just mean in academic terms. What you are proposing is to sacrifice your DS2 in order to help your DS1.

That sounds harsh, but the reality is that in no way is a year going to be sufficient, if the problem is big enough to need a school in another country and the issue hasn't been tackled successfully at the age of 10.

At the age of 10, your DS has presumably had 5 years of schooling where he has been unable to develop his writing skills. That's 5 years that he'd have to catch up. What you are suggesting, by moving school for just one year, is that he'd be able to make 5 times the amount of progress that a child without dyslexia would make.

Sorry, pressed post.

Our decisions have to be the best ones for all of the family, or at least, the least bad ones, that will do the least harm to the family as a whole, while helping the child who needs it the best we can.

Socially, also, consider that you're proposing to uproot your DS from everything he knows, put him in a foreign country, in a new school, for just 3 terms. It'll take him at least 1½ terms to settle, leaving him only 1½ terms to be settled, before uprooting him again.

That's a huge pressure for a child who knows his family have sacrificed everything for his academic needs.

Forpetesake, we are considering the same thing as you, leaving DH, moving back to the UK for the next three years. We have considered leaving DD who is also 6 with DH, but decided against it. So if we do it, I will move back with both of them. It will be harder for me, but like lougle said, DS who is almost 8 is not going to grow out of his difficulties in a year. It is unfair on DD too, specially DH's job involves a lot of travelling and there will be time when she will be left with the helper for weeks at a time with no parents around. Both DD and DS are used to DH being away, but not me. And more than anything, we felt the siblings need to be together and we can't sacrifice DD because of DS.

ForPetesSakeNotAgain - if you are interested in home education with specialist dyslexia teaching - the dyslexia centre my son goes to also does skype dyslexia tuition for overseas students.

I considered it (as I live an hour away from the centre) but the severity of DS's dyslexia and his ADHD meant that it wasn't an option for him. PM me if you want details of the centre.

Some of the dyslexia schools are boarding so you could consider your DS boarding in the UK during term time rather than you both relocating. My DS started boarding at a special school (but for ASD) at age 11. It is a different situation, as it was more of a last resort for DS (mainstream not an option at all), plus he could return home during weekends. Or, if your DS is too young now, you could think about coming here with him for the first year or two, then switching to boarding (if he still needs the specialist input) when he is older. If you want that option, it's best to look at the specialist schools which offer boarding.

I agree that it's a massive sacrifice you're considering, but having been put into a similar position myself, I don't agree that it's necessarily too much of a sacrifice. You have to work with the options that are available to you, and your choices will be based on factors that are different in every family. Is it not an option at all for your DH to relocate back to the UK? Or another country where he could find work and there is also decent SEN provision?

I've known parents who have sent their dc to dyslexia schools and one of the major changes the school has made is to the self-esteem and social skills of the child - it's much more holistic than simply additional tuition for literacy difficulties. I'm not sure you could replicate that in home tuition with specialist dyslexia teaching. But I don't know how severe your DS's difficulties are - these are dc who had become quite depressed due to their lack of progress and pretty much ended up school refusing by that stage.

I sent my DS to a specialist day dyslexic school for years 5/6. He made great progress in a small school/class situation and really enjoyed the school and his confidence grew.

He then went to a very good but large comprehensive school in year 7, the school did lots of setting and because it is a very good/popular school DS ended up in middle/lower sets for everything. He was not able to access any extra help and he got really fed up with low level disruption and never being in class with his friends (who were mainly in the top sets). He was quiet and well behaved and was rather invisible.

He became rather unhappy so we moved him in year 9 to a smaller school which is more focused on the individual than the exam results.
He is in yr 10 and is still not really making the progress we had hoped, he is rather lazy and unmotivated and has learned to not stand out and will not join any extra clubs/activities. I know the school thinks he is more able than his current grades show and they do try and help him but he does not apply himself as well as he could.

I don't know if we made good or bad choices, but I do know that self esteem is really important and he lost lots of it when he went to the large school, so it depends what you think you will do after the dyslexic school as it is often really hard for dyslexic children when they are teenagers as they have self doubt and it creeps into their whole life.

My DS is happy in his school and has lots of friends but I don't think he will do well in his GCSE exams next year.

struggles very badly with writing and spelling

This does matter, but I'm not sure it's worth switching country over. As said above, lots of 1-1 is useful. What are your other options?

Could you flexi-school? Use word-processing or voice recognition software for schoolwork? Encourage his reading, and educate the school to forget his spelling for the time being? Wait until he's a bit bigger (maybe 13+) and look at boarding options?

Hi everyone

Thanks again everyone for your supportive comments. I have found them really useful. Reintegrating into mainstream does not seem that easy. I can't throw off this dream that I can come up with some magic solution that will make DS1's problems melt away .

I am hoping that the family disruption will not be as huge as it might be. DH and I both have work we can do from any location so in practice we will probably alternate half terms - me in UK one half of the term and then DH in the UK for the next half etc. DS1 & DS2 will see each other at half-terms and holidays. They will miss each other I am sure but on the plus side they will get lots of 1 on 1 time and won't have to fight for the Wii remote!

It will be disruptive and horribly expensive though. DS1 is at a school with small class sizes, lovely interesting lessons but not much focus on the basics (it is an IB school). Kids without difficulties muddle through and pick up what they need but kids like DS1 with learning challenges tend to struggle badly and the school provides no special support. DS1 will shortly be moving to the secondary school where the pressure and the homework really start to build and I guess we were hoping that a year (maybe 2) at a good specialist school might enable him to cope. With hindsight if I had known he had dyslexia, he would have been better off starting in a more traditional school.

We can't get good dyslexic help here and I am worried that I am seeing his self esteem shrink as he falls behind the rest of his class. I suppose I was hoping that in this 1 year we might get a magic bullet that would cancel out the last few years of rather spotty literacy teaching and restore some of his self esteem so he could return here where we are happy. I don't want him to board even when he is older if we can avoid it. We are looking at extreme options (both in expense and disruption) in an attempt to find a way to stay here long-term. DS2 is very happy here and the lifestyle suits us all.

I wonder if we could achieve a lot of what we want by bringing out a specialist dyslexia from the UK to work with him 1:1 for a year or two supporting him at school. I know it would be wildly expensive but so is setting up a second home in the UK, paying dyslexic school fees and travelling back and forth thousands of miles. Does anyone have any idea how we would find someone really good from the UK who could do that? I mean someone up with the modern methods and who could do the stuff they would do at a specialist UK school?

There is no quick fix. There is just lots of structured, carefully reinforced practice. Which doesn't have to be done by a super-skilled dyslexia person. Spelling and writing are learned skills, like driving. It would probably be useful if you could figure out why the writing and spelling are so much weaker than the other skills, so you can introduce compensations and aim the practice at the particular issue. You want someone who knows how to motivate and encourage children and to always set the bar just high enough so if they stretch they can reach it.

That said, lots of people do talk about the benefits of addressing underlying neurological deficits like 'tracking', 'binocular vision', the effects of 'colour' Some interventions and the evidence base and an overview, processing speed, phonological processing, motor planning issues etc. It's unlikely these would help in general, and there will be some element of 'placebo effect', but there are plenty of anecdotes of major improvements in particular children.

As someone with a DC with severe dyslexia, I would absolutely insist on a super-skilled dyslexia specialist. My son has had a whole raft of interventions from daily non-specialists, weekly dyslexia specialists, myself, TAs, LSAs - you name it he's had it. All we've collectively succeeded in doing is regressing him even further and given him an extreme anxiety disorder.

I am now off to tribunal to insist that he has daily super-skilled dyslexia intervention as everybody and everything else has failed.

Mind you, he is the most severely dyslexic child two EPs have ever come across in both their collective extensive careers, so he probably isn't typical. But the non-specialist support has done far far more long-term damage than good.

Rosie - but unfortunately you don't know yet whether a 'super-skilled dyslexia specialist' will help any more than anything else has.

Nor do you know whether a dyslexia school employs super-skilled specialists.

That is true, I don't know if it'll work but I have to try because everything else has failed.

But yes, I do know that the school I want him to go to does indeed employ super-skilled specialists.

The alternative is to accept the LA's Statement, which is to put him in a mainstream school (with double the class size he had in his previous school) and an on-site Speech unit with absolutely zero dyslexia provision and not a single teacher in either the mainstream or the unit with any kind of dyslexia experience.

Thanks for your input - again greatly appreciated. DS1 spent 8 weeks 1 to 1 with Lindamood Bell in the US and didn't seem to get anything from it. Phonics just doesn't seem to be DS1's thing - I think he is very visual (right-brained and sees everything in 3D etc) and we need a real specialist as you say rosielou who can determine his precise learning style and work with it. And you're right MareeyaDoloures it definitely needs to be someone motivating and encouraging rather than shouty Mummy .

I saw the school Principal today - he has promised a male teacher who we know is brilliant for the class next year (it is a small class) and is happy to work with us in incorporating 1:1 support provided by us.

So that leaves us with trying to find that 1:1 support. Any good ideas anyone on how best to go about finding that? Would a newly qualified teacher with SEN training be the way to go and if so where would we advertise for one? I want to recruit from the UK as I don't want to confuse the mix with American spelling and pronunciation.

ForPetesSake - I'll PM you the details of my DC's specialist dyslexia teacher who does skype lessons for overseas students. As I said in a previous post, I don't know if it'll work because it does depend on the child, their age and their diagnosis. Because of my son's ADHD and his age, it wasn't an option for us. But it might be worth you considering.

A newly qualified teacher with SEN training. They typically get one day of SEN in their whole PCGE course (if you're lucky).

Something like this, maybe? Could you sponsor someone to do it?

RosieLou, I'm not saying the superskilled person isn't necessary. just that the very highly skilled person who assesses, plans and monitors the programme doesn't necessarily have to be the one who actually administers it. Which is important if OP is looking to privately import a 1-1.

Though I appreciate delegating delivery (or anything else) is very likely to fail dismally within the chaos of current UK SEN provision.

Delegating delivery sounds an interesting idea MareeeyaDoloures. So you mean maybe find someone who is really good in the UK at working out what DS1 needs to be taught and the best methods to teach him and then find someone local (or maybe a fun enthusiastic new teacher from the UK as Caribbean teachers tend not to do fun!) who can deliver this under her guidance? That sounds like a runner. I was hoping the ed psych would do some of that in her report last year but she didn't. Anyone have any suggestions for where I could go for this top-notch dyslexia person? We will be visiting the UK this summer and staying in West Sussex (with occasional forays to Somerset and Bedfordshire) so I'd rather not see someone in Scotland. Does anyone have any experience of the Helen Arkell Centre?

Pushing at an open door? and here

One of my dds is dyslexic and we go to one of the centre's for one to one tuition which we are backing up with the Units of Sound programme, the home version is Literacy that works. It costs about £60 and you need headphones and microphone but my dd can do about ten minutes everyday before school and ten minutes when she comes home. It's worth having a go at and you can order it from Dyslexia action. It was something that I noticed they used in the dysleixia school I visited. Just an idea.

Also, there are places like Emerson house in London. They are not a school, but specialist centre to help children develope the skills they need for a mainstream school.
DS did a typing course there in the holidays. There was a boy on the typing course whose parents were expats, and he had come over to do some stuff with them over the holidays.... I am not sure exactly what, but might be worth investigating?