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| TX: 22.06.09 - Dyslexia PRESENTER: JULIAN WORRICKER |
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| Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WORRICKER Now 4,000 teachers in England are going to be trained as dyslexia experts to spot the condition and give extra support to struggling children. It's the government's response to a dyslexia review, commissioned by the Department of Children's, Families and Schools which has been launched in the past hour. Ten per cent of the population is thought to have the learning difficulty which prevents them reading and spelling correctly. Today's review is written by the education expert, Sir Jim Rose, and I spoke to him a short time ago from our radio car at a school in South London and asked him to describe the current situation. ROSE Well I think what we've surely got now in English schools is a good deal more understanding of how children learn to read. We did a major reading review a few years ago and I think there's a greater consistency of approach. For example, things to do with raising children's phonic awareness and all the work that's been done on phonic skills and so forth. That's moved on apace and a lot of the old arguments seemed to have resolved themselves in really now to getting down to making practise work. Dyslexia is a bird of a rather different feather in that the argument was does it exist and I think what we can say now with confidence, as a result of all we've been doing over this last 12 months or so, is that it is certainly something which exists and we should again move away from this argument as to whether it does or doesn't and just ask well what are the sub-skills that we're looking at because reading is not just one skill it's many and some children have difficulty with one or other of those skills, sometimes these are inherited difficulties. So, you know, these are the sort of bits of the territory that we should now be looking at in more detail and dyslexia should be treated, I think, very seriously in that respect. WORRICKER So if it exists and you're clear that it does, why in some cases is it still not being spotted and children are being left behind? ROSE Well because it's on a spectrum. I mean for some children these are mild difficulties which certainly can be picked up and dealt with through good quality teaching, what we call wave 1 teaching for all children. So all children should be entitled to that high quality of teaching of reading because reading is so important. And whatever I say about reading, I mean, is matched by writing, I mean the two are almost reversible processes - reading and spelling. So it's a very important area to make sure that we're addressing difficulties at all levels. There are some children who have severe difficulties in these respects and they need additional help from people who really have got I would say specialised training and know the detail very well. WORRICKER So this is where the teachers who are going to be specifically trained as experts within the field come in, clearly ... ROSE Yes. WORRICKER How do you counter the difficulty that will surely arise where teachers move around the profession - they don't stay at the one school, so a school might have an expert for a while but when he or she moves on what happens then? ROSE Well we're talking about sort of three levels of training really. I mean, first of all, anyone who is teaching beginner readers - let's just think about primary schools - a qualified primary teacher in this day and age has got to know how to teach reading well, there's no doubt about that. So we expect that level of training for all teachers. Then most schools have people called SENCOs, special educational needs coordinators, or they have someone who looks after literacy and so forth and generally speaking there'll be a policy in the school to help children who are struggling one way or another. On top of that we think there should be a level of training which really does give access for the school, remember, to the expertise they need for these children who are really having the greatest difficulty. These teachers, and 4,000 have been promised under the recommendations accepted for this review, they will work with other teachers - it's not a matter of them going in only to teach children on a one-to-one or small group basis. The whole idea really behind this is that they should be able to do that, they should be able to demonstrate how to do it well but above all, or if you like, together with that, they should make absolutely sure that they're helping the school improve its expertise by supporting teachers to do that very job. WORRICKER Right, because others - because others lower down the scale - and apologies for using that phrase but you know what I mean, in other words not the ones who are the actual 4,000 experts - they will have available to them, as I understand it, some sort of online course, is that sufficient realistically? ROSE Well I mean what's proposed is that we'll be tackling this from several directions. The online course is one and then this business of having someone who will be readily available to give advice. And most importantly to monitor what's going on, to actually get in there, if you like, and assess the quality of the work that's going on and make sure there's a strong feedback to heads, governors and the teachers in the school, including of course the SENCOs we talked about earlier. So I mean it's of that order and I think it's a step in the right - I'm quite surprised that we've managed to get this level of resource straightaway and I'm really hopeful that things can move forward. WORRICKER And within teacher training is there enough in this area at the moment? ROSE Teacher training for reading and certainly for mathematics, I mean things are changing all the time and my view for the better in up-skilling teachers and offering more and better training and that's true of mathematics as a result of the Williams' review and certainly I think an outcome of the reading review. So teacher training institutions and the whole raft of other arrangements for initial teacher training are really coming into their own in terms of responding to this sort of requirement. WORRICKER Part of your report actually offers a definition of dyslexia as, and I quote, a learning difficulty which primarily affects skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. What does that add to the debate the fact that you now have a definition of this which hasn't existed with quite that level of definition before? ROSE Well there are several - I mean as you've hinted there - there have been several definitions whizzing around and we thought that we would look at this for the purpose of a working definition for us. When we did look at it I mean it was important to use this definition to - how can I put it - identify the characteristics of dyslexia, in other words to look at those sub-skills which we found were being repeatedly, as it were, faced as difficulties with children who you would say were dyslexic. So the definition is given as, if you like, a framework for which to identify some of those very, very important skills. WORRICKER I mean there are doubters here, I mean I'm reading this comment from Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University, he says - he questions how dyslexia therefore differed from children who simply found reading difficult. What is the difference? ROSE Well the difficulty - the difference is there are different degrees of difficulty. We also know, by the way, that at least a couple of facets of it, which are important and pretty prominent, because you do fall across them quite often, are inherited and run in families. So you know to deny that dyslexia exists seems to me to be really not a sustainable argument and not one that's going to help us move forward. WORRICKER But he's not doing that is he, he's simply saying that if you give it a broad brush definition you don't actually specify sufficiently what you then need to do by way of acting upon it. ROSE Yeah that's why we've tried to give it far more than just a broad brush definition and we've said it's a working definition which will get you to the sub-sets of skills that we ought to be trying to identify. WORRICKER Well that was Sir Jim Rose speaking to me earlier on. Our reporter Carolyn Atkinson is here in the studio. What has the reaction to this report been so far Carolyn? ATKINSON Well so far so good I would say. What we have today is a dyslexia plan and to put it in context, it's going to be running alongside something called The Every Child A Reader Plan, which was rolled out across England about a year ago. I've been speaking to a few key organisations this morning, for example the Institute of Education, they say it's a very big step forward, they're very pleased that it's recognising the need for early support and early identification of dyslexia in primary schools. WORRICKER What about the teachers what do they say? ATKINSON Well quite a lot falls on to the teachers, as we've been hearing, the National Union of Teachers is pretty pleased with it, they welcome the additional funding for training of teachers but they do predict that we'll need more teachers to be trained in the future to assess the needs of children with dyslexia. I spoke to an independent education expert who also welcomed the report in general but she did want to see more commitment from local authorities to support the schools as they roll this all out. And as for timescales Sir Jim Rose says he wants to see this report being implemented pretty much immediately and he says he'd hoped to see real improvements in children with dyslexia over the next couple of years. WORRICKER Carolyn, thank you very much for that and of course if you want to add your point of view to it the e-mail address bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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