Asking the Question: Screening in Primary Schools
Tuesday 28 March 2023
Q. What is screening?
A. Early identification of individuals who are struggling to learn to read is vital to be able to provide early intervention to support literacy.
Screening tests and checklists help to give an indication of strengths and weaknesses and can help identify the likelihood of an individual having specific learning difficulties. Screening does not provide a diagnosis (for which a full diagnostic assessment would be required) but can be an accessible way of determining that a child may need additional support.
You can find the BDA checklists for adults and children here
Q. Are children currently screened for dyslexia or any other specific learning difficulties in primary schools?
A. Not as standard in the UK. Whilst some specialist schools may opt to screen some or all children for dyslexia, this is not routinely undertaken in all mainstream schools.
In the USA, dyslexia screening is much more prevalent. Most (but not all) states have legislation requiring dyslexia screening in schools.
Q. Is any screening currently undertaken in primary schools?
A. Yes. Since 2012 all children have undertaken a phonics screening check in year one (aged five or six).
This is to assess their ability to decode words and the check contains a mix of 40 real words and ‘non-words’ (or ‘nonsense words’), with a threshold of 32 being set to identify those who have found the check difficult. Schools are expected to put support in place to help children who have not met the standard.
Supporters claim this enables children who are struggling with literacy to be identified
However, critics are concerned that children maybe ‘taught to the test’ and that literacy standards in primary schools are not improving overall. More children reach the phonics screening standard each year in the KS1 check, however an increasing number of children are also failing to meet literacy standards at the end of primary school.
Q. Should dyslexia screening be required in all schools?
A: The Dyslexia Screening and Teacher Training Private Member’s Bill proposed by Matt Hancock MP calls specifically for a programme of dyslexia screening in primary schools, together with initial teacher training to provide awareness of the needs of pupils with dyslexia and the support that they may need.
Dyslexia screening is much broader than phonics screening and typically includes a number of subtests to assess various competencies specifically relevant to dyslexia. Rolling out a mandatory programme of dyslexia screening would be a significant and costly undertaking, requiring substantial investment in teacher training and support
Q. What are the alternatives?
A. The BDA has always advocated for increased dyslexia training and support for teachers both in their initial training and in their CPD. We continue to lobby for this.
There is also a wider debate going on among the scientific community. Academic research is increasingly investigating the co-occurrence of learning difficulties and seeking common underlying factors. Rather than a dyslexia screener, some researchers suggest that a ‘universal’ screener may be more beneficial to identify children who are struggling to learn. This would assess multiple cognitive competencies known to be vital to children’s successful engagement with the breadth of the primary curriculum such as: vocabulary, sustained attention, working memory, and phonics.
Proponents suggest that results would indicate the possibility of ‘neurodiversity’ and learning differences which could then be taken into account for teaching and learning.
How this could be practically delivered is not yet proposed. There are also concerns that this would not fit into the current systems for accessing funding for support in schools.
Visit the APPG pages here for further discussion of screening.