Dyslexia claim stirs furore
Education experts hit back last week after a Labour MP claimed that dyslexia was 'a cruel myth' that should be consigned to the 'dustbin of history'.
Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley, blamed poor teaching methods for illiteracy and said that children should be taught using synthetic phonics, citing the success of schools in West Dunbartonshire.
Writing on the website manchesterconfidential.com, Mr Stringer said, 'The reason that so many children fail to read and write is because the wrong teaching methods are used. The education establishment, rather than admit that their eclectic and incomplete methods are at fault, have invented a brain disorder called dyslexia.'
He added, 'To label children as dyslexic because they're confused by poor teaching methods is wicked.'
Mr Stringer said that if dyslexia really existed, countries like Nicaragua and South Korea would not have been able to achieve literacy rates of nearly 100 per cent.
But Dr Daryl Brown, head of Maple Hayes School in Lichfield, Staffordshire, an independent special school that has pioneered its own methods of teaching dyslexic children which do not involve phonics or multi-sensory methods, said phonics was not the answer, because dyslexic children struggle to process written text phonologically.
He said tests of whether children can read nonsense words are often used to identify dyslexia because they highlight a child's struggle to sound out printed words.
Dr Brown said, 'I meet dyslexic child after dyslexic child who cannot learn using phonics. There is a phenomenal amount of evidence that phonics is not the only way children learn to read. Phonics may be effective in teaching the majority of children, but Maple Hayes was set up for those children for whom it doesn't work.'
Children who attend Maple Hayes school have usually had years of intensive phonics teaching but are still falling behind.
Parents have usually been to a special educational needs tribunal to prove that their child has made no progress and get them referred to the right specialist provision.
Dr Brown said, 'The heart of the problem comes down to identifying dyslexia. Most young children starting school have problems that are often described as symptoms of dyslexia, such as spelling words just like they sound or writing "b" instead of "d".
'It is only when children have been through the first couple of years of primary school and these issues have not been resolved naturally that dyslexia can be identified.'
Mike Fleetham, an author who has a nine-year-old son who is dyslexic, said Graham Stringer and others should 'get past the language and labelling' and 'make things happen for those learners whose brains simply aren't wired for language'.
