KEY POINTS:
So. The Ministry of Education has finally recognised that dyslexia exists. It's incredible that for years thousands of parents and their children, and hundreds of specially trained teachers have been working on minimising the effects of a debilitating reading and writing disability that the ministry denied existed.
What on earth did the ministry's experts think these kids were doing at school? Being naughty? Being deliberately wilful? Choosing not to read and write? In the absence of any help or support in schools, parents have been paying for private tuition that has, in many cases, produced some excellent results. They will probably still have to go on paying. According to the Dyslexia Foundation, there are more than 70,000 kids with dyslexia in this country and, given the ministry's limited resources, it's unlikely all of them will get the specialist help they need. The problem with dyslexia is that it is not one disability - one dyslexic might reverse the order of letters in a word; another might jumble whole words in a sentence. And there is no one way of teaching dyslexics. So it's a tricky one.
But now that the ministry's finally acknowledged dyslexia as a condition, parents will no longer be battling to help their child conquer a disability that they've been told doesn't exist.
