Dr E N Brown comments:

Pupils need more tests for dyslexia

55% of those children who failed to achieve expected levels in SATs does not surprise me in the least. Each week I am spending 2 days or more advising desperate parents who know that their children, usually boys, are failing. The demands on our time for advice have escalated as has the problem. Most will not be able to get their children to this top-performing school for dyslexics in time.

The problem is that headteachers of primary schools are conditioned by their local education authorities not to refer children for assessment. The parents who don’t take no for an answer get an independent psychologist’s assessment and even then usually get a refusal from the LEA to do a statutory assessment. Without a statutory assessment, you don’t get a statement; if you don’t get a statement, you have no guarantee that a child will have provision. It is as easy, and difficult, as that.

We have the very recent case of AF aged 11, of good average intelligence, who was refused a statutory assessment by Birmingham, despite having all aspects of literacy in the bottom 1 percent. Another case, JM of Dudley, again of average intelligence, wasn’t referred at all by his primary school and it wasn’t until things were going disastrously wrong in his secondary school and he became a school refuser that his parents took him to an independent psychologist who found that his literacy skills were mainly at or below the 1 per cent level, including his phonic skills. As with almost all dyslexics, he just doesn’t learn by phonics and the primary school just gave him more and more.

I was in tribunal last week for a severely dyslexic child in Walsall. This time, her primary school had tried everything and had then referred her to the LEA for statutory assessment. They refused, basically saying that they did not believe the independent chartered psychologist’s report – yet their own psychologist had never tested the child. This time, very unusually, the school did not stand back but pressed the matter with the LEA and the child now has a statement and is awaiting a tribunal decision on her placement.

The overall problem lies with local authorities. Special needs services are certainly stretched, but this is mainly because they have no solution to the increasing numbers of dyslexic children thrown up by the system. To mask their inadequacy, they automatically refuse assessment and most parents give in and go away. The House of Commons Select Committee on Education has strongly recommended that the assessment arms of LEAs (especially the psychological services) are divorced from funding arms. It hasn’t happened because the government has not stepped in to make it happen.

Even when a child gets a statement for Specific learning difficulties/ dyslexia, the outcomes in mainstream schools at Key Stage 4 are very poor and certainly not what one would expect from a Statement of Special EDUCATIONAL Needs. One of the many reasons for this is that statements are written in terms of what the LEA is prepared to give the child as opposed to what the child needs. Contributory to the lack of improvement of children with statements is the practice of LEAs to delegate funding to schools and then tell schools to get on with paying for the provision themselves: It is an LEA’s legal responsibility to pay for what is in a child’s statement, not the school’s.

If the parents who persevere do not always win, what of the parents who never come to realize that their offspring are failing to make progress despite adequate intelligence. The government makes much of helping the poor and disadvantaged get out of the poverty trap. Spotting dyslexics early and then doing something about enabling them to obtain GCSE qualification surely must be the sensible mechanism for getting out of the poverty trap. Remember that 80% of those in Young Offenders’ Institutions are dyslexic!