Still teaching medieval clerks

Dyslexia is the condition of intelligent children who find reading extremely difficult and have problems remembering lines of text and finding the right word.

Although over 120 years ago dyslexia was already referred to as a specific problem in the medical literature, today those who are involved in education are not really aware of dyslexia and still see it merely as an indicator of low intellectual ability.

As schooling is mostly still based on the written word, dyslexic students are at a huge disadvantage. Dyslexic students are usually visual, creative and gifted thinkers, but the present schooling process does not allow them to express their talents. Instead they are judged on what they cannot do, and most of them end up being branded as failures, especially as they are made to sit for exams where the written word still dominates.

Way back in 1997, as minister of education, I supported the setting up of the Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) Service. It was a very modest beginning. Since then it has grown but is still inadequate to address the needs and demands of dyslexic students.

We have at least 1,572 dyslexic students in state schools: 519 at primary level and 1,053 at secondary level. The SpLD staff is made up of 18 persons, resulting in a teacher-student ratio of one SpLD teacher per 97 dyslexic students.

No wonder that over the years the situation of dyslexic students has not improved substantially. Dyslexic students in the classroom are not getting enough support. They are not getting the intensive and focused intervention that they need. The SpLD staff does not have enough time to assist dyslexic students. They are also involved in providing their services to students without dyslexia.

Dyslexic students at secondary level struggle to cope with the increased demands of the curricula, as they lack adequate literacy skills. That is why the have progressed only very slightly. They are not being given the intensive support that they need. The SpLD staff is also faced with assessing a growing number of students with dyslexia, and after most of the students are assessed, they are not given the support that they need and so they fall behind.

Apart from providing an educational experience that respects diversity and allows for students with different kinds of intelligences to show their worth, we need to set up a national centre for dyslexia to provide focused and professional support to dyslexic students. A better-resourced centre can support dyslexic students regularly and also help create dyslexia-friendly schools. Such support needs a whole-school approach, where all the school leadership and teaching staff are made aware that they can play an important role in supporting dyslexic students. Creating dyslexia-friendly schools would benefit all the students, as the educational experience would allow for diversity and enable students to learn in different ways. Such schools would be much more relevant to children living in the 21st century.

Writing about dyslexia and learning difficulties from the inside, Thomas G. West ('In the Mind's Eye') says, "For some four hundred or five hundred years we have had our schools teaching basically the skills of the medieval clerk - reading, writing, counting and memorizing texts. Now it seems we might be on the verge of a new era, when we will wish to, and be required to, emphasize a very different set of skills - those of a Renaissance man such as Leonardo da Vinci. With such a change, traits that are considered desirable today might very well be obsolete and unwanted tomorrow. In place of the qualities desired in a well-trained clerk, we might, instead, find preferable a habit of innovation in many diverse fields, the perspective of the global generalist rather than the narrowly focused specialist and an emphasis on visual content and analysis over parallel verbal modes."

Creating dyslexic-friendly schools means creating 21st-century schools educating all the children for tomorrow rather than for yesterday.

Evarist Bartolo is Minister for Education