What I do

Assessments

Many parents feel that an assessment was the start of being able to understand how to support their child's learning and, most importantly, support their self-esteem.

The assessment is a series of activities designed to assess processing speed, underlying ability, phonological awareness (sounds of language), reading, writing and spelling. I make the activities as much fun as possible and feedback from parents is that children enjoy the process. I also like to get some background information from parents, the child themselves and the school (with the permission of parents). It's important that the report you receive at the end of the process is about your child and not just a list of scores. Recommendations are tailored to your child's needs.

The assessment takes around 3 hours to complete, allowing for breaks, and can be completed at school or here at my base in North Bedfordshire.

What I do for schools.

In addition to assessing students for dyslexia I work with schools to raise awareness about the needs of dyslexic learners. I provide affordable CPD for schools in the form of staff meetings as I believe teachers need to know how to identify and support the needs of the dyslexic learners in their classroom. The British Dyslexic Association estimates that at least 1 in 10 children learn in this way. However, information on dyslexia is rarely included in any teacher training courses. This limits the ability of teachers to help their students reach their full potential. Feedback from these sessions has been very positive as teacher’s finally feel they have an understanding of what dyslexia is and what they can do to support learners and their families.

As a teacher you want to do your best for the students in your class. Many teachers find it hard to know what to do to identify or support students with dyslexia as it's unusual for teacher training courses to include much information on this style of learning.

I provide engaging staff training with lots of guidance for how to identify students with dyslexia, strategies to support them and background to understand what causes the learning behaviours you see in the classroom. This training can be delivered in after school sessions at staff meetings and enables the whole school to participate in finding out more about the educational needs of approximately 15% of the learners in their class.