[senco-forum] dyslexia assessment /usefulness of label (short)

No need for apologies Brendan - my contribution was tongue in cheek anyway. And you are right in my view, to insist on a focus on individual dyslexic symptoms. 

When someone fails to learn to read, whatever label is applied, the ability to acquire competence in one of more of the reading sub-skills must inevitably  be impaired.

 All skills, given sufficient practice, will eventually be executed reflexively ie. without cognition. When I was developing a segmenting course, I worked with older children who routinely tried to decode unfamiliar words, slowly and painfully, one letter at a time. No competent reader does this and my approach was to accustom mind and eye, to perceiving and decoding specific groups of letters as a single entity. 

This works and can, in most cases, become a reflex reaction in one term. This is a form of behaviour modification. Confronting individual sub-skill deficits is, in my view, the most productive way to resolve entrenched reading difficulties.