A personal view of dyslexia

For thirty years I have lived closely with dyslexia, through watching my son battle with it as he grew and through the many children who have gone through Moon Hall School, which I founded by helping Daniel. I have known the frustration of having an intelligent child who inexplicably found reading and spelling almost impossible despite every effort by him and his teachers.

I have great sympathy for Ruth Kelly as I faced exactly the same dilemma twice, around twenty five years ago. My son had failed to even begin to read at our local village school and so I moved him to a small pre-prep that taught through phonics. He did begin to read but spelling was a major difficulty. He survived with one to one lessons until he was nine but by then he was becoming very stressed.

One day he came home distraught and finally managed to say: "How can I tell which words are spelled wrong if the teacher doesn’t tell me?" I discovered that he was being punished because the teacher was marking the margin where there was a spelling mistake but not marking the wrong word. Dan was then expected to recognise which word was wrong and write it out correctly three times. He had guessed and corrected the wrong words. The teacher thought he had done it on purpose and punished him for insolence.

I discovered that Dan spelled phonetically as he had been taught to do but once a word was on paper he could not tell whether or not it was correct because he has a very poor visual memory. After seeing it a few times, most people can carry a template in their head of what a word looks like, the basis of proof reading. People who have a very poor visual memory like Daniel cannot do so. They are the classic word blind dyslexics.

This was my second Ruth Kelly moment but I did not want Dan to go to a boarding school then. The only schools for dyslexic children at the time, although very good, were many miles away. My friend Andrea encouraged me to teach our sons at home and so began Moon Hall School, named after my house so that the postman would have no difficulty knowing where to bring the post!  It was the beginning of a long road and a steep learning curve as my fellow teachers and I strove to find out everything we could about helping dyslexic children.

We studied at the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Centre, and discovered that auditory memory, sequencing, short term memory, phonological awareness, organisation and a variety of other factors are involved in dyslexia. Each dyslexic child is different because every brain is different. We were very excited when scientific advances began to show the differences between dyslexic and non-dyslexic brains.

The school that began with two children now has around fifty full time and another fifty part-time pupils. It has helped several hundred children who come back to tell us of their successes which include university degrees and a variety of businesses.

We have also now set up a second site at Burys Court near Reigate, Surrey, where dyslexic children from a wider area can be helped and where we can extend the age range up to GCSE. It has been a long, hard road but when the children come back full of confidence and leading successful lives, it is so rewarding.