It’s an interesting question, does dyslexia exist? I have been intrigued by the dyslexia debate triggered by Professor Julian Elliott, who wrote “The Dyslexia Myth” in 2005. For a more detailed summary of the ongoing debate please go to my previous blog post. In a nutshell, Prof Elliott enjoys the controversy he creates around the existence and ethics of the concept of dyslexia. He argues that it is a scientifically questionable concept.
Of course, there are many who disagree with Prof Elliott’s findings, and there is a sound and strong research base and scientific basis for the existence of dyslexia. However, I find myself surprisingly and reluctantly on the fence. There is no doubt in my mind that dyslexia exists and has a very significant impact on individuals and society. However, I do think that Prof Elliott has raised a very important point about how we intervene for those with literacy difficulties.
The fundamental problem for me with Professor Elliott’s argument is the very incident he cites as the trigger for his research. I quote from The Guardian’s Long Read by Sirin Kale in September 2020 “The Battle over Dyslexia”:
Julian Elliott “was training to be an educational psychologist when his supervisor invited him to lunch one day. The year was 1984, and Elliott was 28. As they were eating, Elliott’s supervisor mentioned that he had spent the morning testing a child for dyslexia. He had determined the child was dyslexic, and put her on a programme called Data-Pac, a new approach to teaching literacy which paired teachers with children for individual sessions that taught them how to sound out letter combinations. Elliott asked what he would have recommended if the child hadn’t been dyslexic. His supervisor appeared sheepish. He would have put her on Data-Pac anyway, he said.”
Elliott’s quest to ban unnecessary and expensive assessment for dyslexia came from the discovery that the outcome of the assessment was the same treatment as it would have been without the assessment. This is a problem for me, but not for the reasons Elliott states. Far from feeling that this means the assessment was unnecessary, it leads me to wonder why a highly qualified professional would suggest teaching all children with reading difficulties (diagnosed dyslexic or not) using exactly the same programme? Could not the school staff have put her on Data-Pac without the input of an educational psychologist?
Of course, we have come a long way since 1984. In my experience, when a child’s reading difficulties are severe enough to require intervention from a specialist professional, there is a need to personalise a programme depending on the child’s specific needs. Having the label of dyslexia should not and does not make a difference to how children are taught; it is what the learning profile, provided by the dyslexia assessment, shows us that makes the difference. Data-Pac was before my time, but even now no one programme fits all (though there are some basic essential elements; for more details see my blog post “Intervention is like Pizza”).
In fact, I share the professor’s concern about equity. Dyslexia assessment is complicated and expensive; not all students need this. However, when a child is not making progress in spite of well founded intervention, as specialists we have a duty to respond by finding out why. Sadly, there is no “quick fix” for those with the most persistent and severe literacy difficulties.
So does dyslexia exist?
Yes, dyslexia exists. But we live in an unfair world. It bothers me that parents are still left to commission assessments themselves; while other children with obvious dyslexia but poorer and less educated parents go unassessed, in spite of the work of Sir Jim Rose in 2009 recommending specialist training in every school. I’m passionate about changing this in order to empower and enable schools to demystify dyslexia and crack on with finding solutions that work for each individual child.
