[senco-forum] Dyslexia and general learning needs

The first step in any problem solving strategy is to define the problem and in dyslexia, there is no single widely accepted of definition - there are a number of widely accepted definitions which is of course a recipe for the kind of confusion which in fact prevails. We do tend to think of dyslexia as primarily a reading disability because that is the usually its most obvious manifestation in school -  but we don't even have a professionally accepted definition of reading let alone dyslexia. 

In Education we have two indisputable realities. They are

  1.. Total indecision about the definition of reading
  2.. A consistently high number of children leaving school less than functionally literate (about 1 in 5)

It is possible to demonstrate that this situation has prevailed for at least seven decades and I would hazard a guess that these two realities are not unrelated.

Eddie Carron