British Dyslexia Association response to Evening Standard article on cost of illiteracy to the UK

The report in the Evening Standard is both valuable and depressing.

To know the sheer scale of the problem that still exists shows how far we have to go to achieve our goal of a dyslexia friendly society. The situation is still better than when the British Dyslexia Association first started. The British Dyslexia Association has been campaigning for 40 years to have dyslexia awareness as part of teacher training.

Being able to provide adequate teaching to young dyslexics is vital, not only for their personal education and sense of achievement, but to the country as a whole as this report states only too clearly.

Many of the world’s most creative and successful minds have been dyslexic ones (eg. Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci), yet the lack of understanding and diagnosis is still chronic. For this reason, the British Dyslexia Association is calling on all teachers to receive dyslexia awareness training as standard so that young people are not lost in system and the country as a whole will benefit in more ways than one.

Dr. Kate Saunders, CEO of the British Dyslexia Association said “We are urging everyone to sign our e-petition http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20674 to support the call that ALL teachers should have a decent level of input in their initial teacher training courses about dyslexia.

“They should all be taught how to spot the signs of dyslexia, how to teach in a dyslexia friendly way in the classroom and when to seek further help in the form of assessment and a specialist teaching programme. Incredibly, this has never been mandatory in initial teacher training. The government produced a short module that would do the job, with the course materials all written. But instead of it being used in all teacher training courses it was placed in the government archives. It isn’t helping dyslexic children sitting there!

“We want this module to be used as a mandatory minimum level of input on initial teacher training courses. It isn’t very lengthy, but it is essential. We know that many teachers when they leave teacher training do not feel confident about how to teach dyslexic pupils. Surely if we want to improve literacy skills we need to help the 10% of the school population who have some level of dyslexia. We need to identify them as early as possible and enable them to learn while they are at school.

“Please sign our petition. We need 100,000 signatures to trigger a debate in parliament on this issue. Future generations of dyslexic children are depending on the government to make this change.”

See the Evening Standard article here.