I thought this article was interesting, but an American parent of a dyslexic child ccommented:

Oh my god! As if there is no way to diagnose dyslexia other than a discrepancy between IQ and reading ability?! What a poorly researched article — but not surprising, given the British cultural prejudices around learning differences and mental illnesses.

Sirin Kale writes in the Guardian:

Julian “Joe” Elliott was training to be an educational psychologist when his supervisor invited him to lunch one day. The year was 1984, and Elliott was 28. As they were eating, Elliott’s supervisor mentioned that he had spent the morning testing a child for dyslexia. He had determined the child was dyslexic, and put her on a programme called Data-Pac, a new approach to teaching literacy which paired teachers with children for individual sessions that taught them how to sound out letter combinations. Elliott asked what he would have recommended if the child hadn’t been dyslexic. His supervisor appeared sheepish. He would have put her on Data-Pac anyway, he said.

Elliott thought that was weird, but what did he know? He qualified as an educational psychologist in 1986 and began practising. Over the next decade, he was often asked to assess children for dyslexia. At this time, most educational psychologists believed that dyslexia was a learning difficulty with a neurological basis, which affected bright children whose difficulties reading and writing could not be explained by the usual factors, such as low IQ, not having attended school or having a chaotic home life. The method for diagnosing dyslexia, known as the discrepancy model, was relatively straightforward: test a child’s IQ and their reading age, and if there was a discrepancy between the two – average-to-high IQ, low literacy – that child was dyslexic. Elliott felt unsure about these assessments. The children he tested for dyslexia all struggled to read and write – that much was clear – but their literacy difficulties manifested in different ways. Elliott was still junior, and he chalked up this sense of uncertainty to imposter syndrome.

In 1998, Elliott co-wrote a guide for teachers working with children with special needs. The book was nominated for the Times Educational Supplement’s academic book of the year award, but if Elliott was being honest with himself, the chapter on dyslexia wasn’t up to much. “It was a bit of a shitty chapter, really,” Elliott told me. “I hadn’t got a handle on it.” Six years later, when his publishers asked him to write a second edition of the book, he was determined to nail the chapter on dyslexia. He was older now, more experienced. He collected every study on dyslexia he could find and started reading.

In his research, Elliott came across one particularly startling paper. In 1964, a young researcher called Bill Yule was sent to the Isle of Wight to carry out fieldwork on dozens of schoolchildren with reading difficulties. Yule was in no doubt that many of the children he studied suffered horrendously in trying to read and write. He saw it firsthand. But Yule – who would become one of the leading educational psychologists of his generation – couldn’t find a pattern of indicators, common to all the children he tested, that would coalesce into a single syndrome called dyslexia. Each child’s literacy problems seemed to be different.

Elliott made a note of Yule’s study and continued researching. Until the 70s, dyslexia had been a way to explain why intelligent children couldn’t read. But in the 80s, research started coming out which suggested that your IQ had no bearing on your ability to read or write. (One of the first critiques of the discrepancy model was published in 1980, and further papers debunking the model were published throughout the 90s.) Intelligence and reading ability weren’t connected, meaning that dyslexia could no longer be defined as a condition that affected only bright children who struggled to read. Anyone, with any level of intelligence, could be dyslexic.

Hunkered in his study, piles of academic papers at his feet, Elliott asked himself: if you couldn’t test dyslexia by means of IQ, how could you test for it? If Yule hadn’t been able to find a uniform diagnostic criteria – a pattern that fit all the dyslexic children he’d studied – was it even a condition at all? And what was the point in testing for something if, as his supervisor had acknowledged over lunch all those years ago, the treatment was the same, regardless of whether you had it or not? “That’s when the penny dropped,” Elliott says. “It was all bollocks.”

Since that day, Elliott, a professor of education at Durham University, has made it his mission to challenge the orthodoxy on dyslexia. He argues that there is essentially no difference between a person who struggles to read and write and a person with dyslexia – and no difference in how you should teach them. Dyslexia is such a broad term, he argues, that it is effectively meaningless. According to Elliott, we should stop using the word dyslexia, and with it the need for an educational psychologist to diagnose what is plain for all to see: that a child is struggling to read and write. Instead, we should be trying to help all children with literacy difficulties, not just those who have been diagnosed with dyslexia.

Elliott is relaxed about stirring up controversy – he sometimes gives the impression he quite enjoys it. He receives hate mail fairly regularly. “A pantomime baddy … the word bully comes to mind,” is how one specialist dyslexia teacher characterised Elliott, after seeing him talk at an event. Elliott is like “a climate-change denier”, Callum Heckstall-Smith, then head of communications for the British Dyslexia Association (BDA), told me. “[He] has absolutely no backing academically,” said Lord Addington, a Liberal Democrat peer and president of the BDA, when I mentioned Elliott.

Yet although not all experts agree with Elliott, the truth is that his views have found favour among many educational psychologists. “Joe is not, I think, a maverick,” says Prof Simon Gibbs of Newcastle University. “His and my view, based on the available scientific evidence, is that there is no hard, fast or easy way to diagnose dyslexia.” It’s a view shared by Greg Brooks, emeritus professor of education at Sheffield University, who reviewed all the available definitions of dyslexia in 2004. “No two definitions agreed,” says Brooks. “Long before I met Joe, I also came to the same conclusions as him.” According to Vivian Hill, professor of educational psychology at University College London, “All Joe is doing is telling people what the scientific research is saying”. In January, Elliott was given an outstanding achievement award by the British Psychological Society, in recognition of his work on dyslexia.

For Elliott, this is not just a matter of scientific accuracy. He also believes that the current system entrenches inequality, because children from poorer backgrounds tend to be less likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia. “Reading difficulties are real. I’ve seen thousands of kids with reading difficulties,” he told me. “You know what? Very few of the ones I saw in the inner cities, in the council estates, get diagnosed with dyslexia.”

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In recent years, the work of Elliott and like-minded scientists has proved increasingly influential in the UK. In 2018, two local authorities – Staffordshire and Warwickshire – announced that they would no longer differentiate between children with dyslexia and children with literacy difficulties. “It is widely accepted that the diagnosis of dyslexia is scientifically questionable,” the guidance – which outlined both local authorities’ provision for children with literacy difficulties – explained.

Instead, they would teach all children equally, partly making use of a pioneering approach that focuses on teaching children to read and write the 100 most commonly used words in the English language, which cumulatively account for 53% of all written English. The approach was piloted in 14 Staffordshire primary schools during a year-long study in 2011. In one school, within eight months, the number of students who had fallen behind with their reading halved, dropping from 60% of the children surveyed to just 32%. Larger studies, using this approach, showed that the incidence of reading difficulties was reduced from 20-25% to between 3-5%.

Despite the success of the earlier pilot scheme, there was strong opposition to Staffordshire and Warwickshire’s announcement in 2018. In October, the BDA president Lord Addington raised the issue in the House of Lords. Addington is a hereditary peer and, since 2011, chair of Microlink, a company that has received £132.3m in government contracts since 2003 to supply assistive technology to students with disabilities, including dyslexia. During the ensuing debate, one peer wondered whether Warwickshire and Staffordshire had “also advised their residents that the Earth is actually flat and that there is no such thing as global warming”. Anxious parents besieged the phone lines of at least one local dyslexia charity, asking whether their dyslexic children would no longer receive help; the BDA gave statements to the specialist education press and the Telegraph, alleging that both local authorities were simply looking to cut costs.

When we met in his narrow House of Lords office late last year, Addington told me that he became concerned about what was happening in Staffordshire and Warwickshire the minute he read the paper outlining the new guidance, which was brought to him by the BDA. “I thought, right, this contradicts the law in numerous places,” said Addington. He felt the guidance stated that dyslexia didn’t exist. “If you’re telling me that dyslexia doesn’t really exist, I’m afraid my everyday experience of life says you’re wrong.” (Addington is dyslexic.) “I said: ‘I’m not having this.’” During the course of our conversation, Addington said that he didn’t speak to the local authorities involved, or the researchers behind the schools pilot, before publicly lobbying to have their policy scrapped. “I criticised them publicly because I suspected what they were doing was wrong,” he explained. “If I’m sitting down there, and I’m any use in parliament at all, I’ll follow my own judgment.”

The debate in the House of Lords – and the flat Earth comments in particular – sent shockwaves through the British educational psychology community. “Neither authority was denying the existence of children with difficulties in reading, or saying that they don’t believe children that others label as dyslexic are not worthy of attention or note. They were trying to help everyone!” Jonathan Solity, an honorary lecturer at UCL, whose research underpinned the Warwickshire and Staffordshire guidance, told me with exasperation. A follow-up event held at UCL in January 2019, at which the Staffordshire and Warwickshire team argued their case, was attended by nearly 200 educational psychologists and watched online by thousands more – a major event in the small world of educational psychology.

Yet by the end of 2019, Staffordshire had dropped the guidance and Warwickshire had also pulled it, pending review. (Both authorities declined to speak with me for this article.) It was the first-ever attempt by a British local authority to ditch dyslexia, and it had failed. But it was also a rare public skirmish in a conflict that has been quietly fought over the past two decades in classrooms, lecture theatres, select committee hearings and special educational needs tribunals across Britain. On one side an emerging collective of academic and local authority educational psychologists, pushing for educators to drop a definition of dyslexia they view as scientifically vague and socially exclusionary. On the other dyslexia advocates, some academics and the parents of dyslexic children, who vigorously defend dyslexia as a meaningful concept that has helped millions of children access support and understanding for their literacy difficulties.

Both sides tend to proceed with implacable certainty, often caricaturing their opponents as unfeeling bureaucrats determined to deny dyslexic children the support they desperately need, or pushy parents determined to secure advantage for their offspring, come what may. “If you want to cause an academic riot,” writes Janice Edwards in The Scars of Dyslexia, “just shout, ‘let’s discuss dyslexia!’ to a hall randomly filled with educational psychologists, assorted educational ‘experts’, politicians, teachers, and parents. Then retire gracefully and watch the mayhem commence.” When I told Greg Brooks about the piece I was writing, he let out a long, delighted laugh. “You don’t know what you’re getting into,” he said. “It’s horribly contentious and horribly messy.” Later, he emailed: “Good luck … prepare for ordure to be hurled.”

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Ahuman being cannot learn to read and write on their own. Unlike speaking or walking, say, it must be taught. Most people in the UK will learn to read and write by the age of seven, but about 20% of the population will struggle to reach this level, and about half of these people are believed to be dyslexic, although not all of these people will be diagnosed. Dyslexic people may look at a piece of text and skip words, or switch letters around. When writing, they sometimes grope for the word they want to use but can’t spell it, so opt for a shorter, imprecise alternative. To the dyslexic student learning to read, books aren’t a portal into another world, but a door that keeps slamming in their face.

The term dyslexia, meaning “difficulty with words”, was coined by a German ophthalmologist, Rudolf Berlin, in 1887, after Berlin noticed that some of his patients struggled to read the printed word during eye tests, leading him to speculate that there may be some neurological reason for their difficulties. In the late 19th century, researchers characterised dyslexia as a disorder that only affects intelligent children with literacy difficulties – a myth that persists to this day.

By the time Bill Yule turned up on the Isle of Wight, fresh out of graduate school, academics knew there were a cohort of children who experienced persistent and unexplained reading difficulties. . .