The Problem
Are you concerned about a child that is underachieving?
As a parent or carer, you may feel that your child is underachieving. As a teacher, you may know that a child ‘has a lot going on for him/her’ but still is struggling. These are typical scenarios with children with a Specific Learning Difficulty (such as dyslexia or dyscalculia) and children with language and attentional difficulties.
These children will have a combination of difficulties that require expert observation and analysis to organise into a coherent picture. Expert analysis is required to use the support available in an effective way.
These are children who may be bright and insightful, but who may read with difficulty, not understand what they read, feel overwhelmed by learning, get easily distracted, don’t seem to understand instructions and who often find writing a real struggle.
For genetic and developmental reasons, there is a great overlap in these conditions, and often children struggle with several areas of their language and literacy, that are interrelated.
Access additional support and specialist services
Schools may get an additional ‘hours’ (budget to allocate support staff to this child) but may not know what to focus on to make the most of this support.
Parents may get a generic dyslexia report that makes a brief mention to ‘verbal difficulties’, as if it was possible that literacy could exist independently of language, but then struggle to find an available teacher specialised in dyslexia, and even more a teacher who is a specialist both in dyslexia and in language development. By the way, the divide between dyslexia and speech and language is an artificial one, based on how professions have evolved in this country: language is at the base of reading and writing, and reading and writing also have a crucial impact in language.
One can’t be fully understood without the other.
This is where I can help.
