Addressing the 
nation’s literacy skills

Most of us take our ability to read and write for granted and find it difficult to imagine how we would go about our daily lives without basic literacy skills.  Yet, there are six million functionally illiterate adults in the UK at an estimated cost of £2.5 billion a year to the country. The facts are all too clear. We have a problem.

Many children who either have dyslexia or difficulties with reading and writing are simply not getting the support they need, and with three dyslexic children in every UK classroom, this is a serious concern.

In UK primary schools we see that one in five children are failing to master the basics of writing, while one in eight children are failing to master the basics of reading by the time they leave for secondary school.  When we look at secondary education, over a third of young people failed to achieve the expected level of an A*-C in English in 2011. 

Transforming teacher training
The Driver Youth Trust, a charity dedicated to improving the life chances of children and young people who struggle with literacy, believes that the answer to this problem is to better train teachers to identify and support children with dyslexia.

The Trust recently produced a report, ‘The Fish in the Tree’, which praises recent improvements in literacy teaching, including the focus on phonics, which is important in helping children with dyslexia. However, it says that more needs to be done.

Rather shockingly, the report flags that 52 per cent of the teachers surveyed were not trained to identify and support children with dyslexia and that 84 per cent feel that this training is important.

While there have been attempts to improve this situation, 70 per cent of initial teacher training providers still spend less than a day with their students on dyslexia‑specific training.

Teachers need to feel confident about recognising and meeting the needs of pupils with literacy difficulties, including dyslexia, in a classroom setting. This is not a situation we can just leave to adults outside of the classroom, although there is a place for interventions and additional reading and spelling support delivered by dyslexia-trained adults. Nor can we assume that dyslexic pupils will eventually catch up. The signs of dyslexia do not simply disappear over time.

The Driver Youth Trust is calling on the government to take urgent action to close the skills gap by insisting all initial teacher training (ITT) courses contain a module on special educational needs (SEN) including dyslexia.  The charity is also calling for all SENCos (Special Educational Needs Coordinators) to have a mandatory minimum level of training around the support of children with literacy difficulties, including dyslexia. Until recently some SENCOs received little or no special training.

In the meantime, teachers can improve their understanding of dyslexia and ensure that they’re providing the correct support for dyslexic pupils by following a few simple steps.

Understanding dyslexia
For many teachers, the first step towards better engagement with dyslexic children is improving their understanding of dyslexia.
While it is commonly known that dyslexia affects an individual’s ability to read and write accurately, it is not often known that the learning difficulty can also affect memory and concentration, as well as an individual’s ability to cope with numeracy. Dyslexia can be described as a spectrum disorder, which means that it ranges from mild to severe.  It has nothing to do with intelligence. Dyslexia affects all walks of life and many dyslexics go on to have successful careers as actors, chefs, dancers, poets, scientists, computer technicians, teachers or indeed anything they choose to be. Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs were all dyslexic.

Typical symptoms of dyslexia include difficulties in phonological awareness (the ability to distinguish sounds in words including syllables); verbal memory (remembering the words you hear, for example when listening to a teacher in class); and verbal processing speed (how quickly you recognise words and access them from your long-term memory).

Identifying dyslexia
Identifying signs of dyslexia and beginning discussions with key staff and parents is an essential starting point for schools.

Dyslexia Screeners, such as the G L Assessment or Lucid Rapid, often indicate areas of difficulty and can be a quick and instant way of clarifying the key challenges presenting to the pupil.

However, an assessment by itself achieves very little. It is crucial that the child’s reading and spelling behaviours are analysed and that subsequent teaching experiences are matched to the learning needs of the child. All too often, children with reading difficulties are presented with books or worksheets beyond their reading level or asked to fill a blank page with writing, without the support systems to make this a less arduous task.

Putting the right 
support systems in place
The support systems necessary to help pupils with dyslexia do not have to involve great sums of money but do need a certain amount of creativity.  Displays around the classroom should inform, remind, and reinforce messages and rules which pupils with weak memories have a tendency to forget. Frequent verbal reminders of these rules and messages is also important. Teachers should discuss how words work with their pupils and which spelling rules they need to be mindful of.

For instance, should a teacher notice that his or her pupils are frequently misspelling a word such as ‘was’, it can be quite helpful for that teacher to ask all of his or her pupils to identify the correct version of the word together given a choice of correct and incorrect spellings was or woz. The teacher could then invite everyone to check and amend their spelling accordingly before continuing with the lesson. Suggesting inventive ways to remember the spelling of certain words can also be effective. For instance, the word ‘was’ can be remembered with the phrases Weetabix And Strawberries, or Whales And Seals.

These rules can then be displayed on the classroom wall to make it easy for everyone to remember. Practising tricky spellings on motivational ICT programmes such as Wordshark can make the learning of difficult spellings fun.

The blank page of an exercise book can often deflate the weak or reluctant writer, with its narrow lines stretching endlessly down the page. Pupils will often respond better when provided with a series of sentence starts that they are required to complete, or a word bank full of relevant words and phrases for them to refer to and use. Younger dyslexic pupils respond particularly well to writing tasks when asked to draw their understanding in sequenced picture boxes before drafting a written account, as this provides a visual overview for the account.

Similarly, the use of ICT programmes such as Clicker 6 and WriteonLine, which have a text-to-speech facility and enable pupils to immediately hear the sentences that they have chosen to produce, can be very effective. Electronic support has made tremendous differences to dyslexic students young and old and needs to feature as early as possible in the dyslexic pupil’s educational career. A child’s reading progress can meanwhile be greatly supported by providing children with dyslexia friendly books written by some of the most popular and current authors, such as those published by Barrington Stokes. No child should ever be prohibited from accessing good, classic literature as a result of their reading difficulties and the provision of audiobooks is a crucial component to any school library. Similarly, reading with a skilled educator, who can help the child to understand how the words on the written page fit together, can make a huge difference to individual and group reading sessions.

To make class contributions less stressful for pupils, teachers can also provide ‘thinking time’ and come back to pupils after they have had some time to prepare answers, rather than quizzing them on the spot. 

There are other tools that schools may consider. Some children are likely to benefit from reading rulers, which provide a coloured film to place over print which helps to make the text more distinct. Some schools will plan for pupils to write on buff coloured paper as well to minimise the visual stress they may be experiencing.

Above all else, schools need to be willing to abide by the principle of ‘notice and adjust’. Notice when a pupil experiences difficulties and adjust the teaching to ensure success. In the words of Neil McKay, author of Removing Dyslexia as a Barrier to Achievement, if a child won”t learn the way we teach, then teach the way they learn.