Amongst the deluge in the house clearing exercise, we found youngest’s list of new year’s resolutions which were brilliant. I will put them on here soon, as they were quite revealing, and could only have been written by one person. She has recently been diagnosed as dyslexic, which I think in many ways has been a great relief to us all. We have been talking to the schools about it for years, and have always been dismissed. Finally someone has taken the time and trouble to look carefully at her situation, and came to a conclusion that we came to years ago. She is a very bright intelligent girl, who is being held back by this fug of frustration that we now know is dyslexia. I have become increasingly frustrated by some of the behaviour of some of the educational establishments I have dealt with lately. I know that SO many good people work in schools, and this is not aimed at them, but there is the stink of failure about the system at the moment. A system that dictates who has a condition like dyslexia based on the financial viability of any possible treatment. We have spoken to several teachers who have told us that as soon as someone is diagnosed, that they take up more budget, and that of course this budget is finite. As a result, the simplest way to deal with this is to only diagnose the severe cases, and to refute the more mild cases. This way, there is no obligation to deal with the problem, and ultimately pay for it. Whilst I cannot guarantee that this is the case with us, it would certainly seem to fit. We had her independently assessed by a specialist who spotted something immediately. Was this because of the incompetence of the many teachers she has worked with? I just can’t accept that this degree of incompetence could go unnoticed in a system. So I can only conclude that they were aware of it, and also aware that they could not afford to deal with it. The confidence issues that she has been dealing with are as a result of this problem, and could have been dealt with so much earlier. So what is the answer? Should the teachers have raised their head above the trenches and made more noise? Well they have their jobs and mortgages to think of, so perhaps not. The head teachers perhaps...well the same applies. The education authorities are the ones in my opinion, who have failed us here, along with government. We have suffered years of failure from governments who have repeated the mantra of “Education, Education, Education” but also repeated the systematic failure of their predecessors. To trot out the old cliché, these kids are the future of the country, and we owe them the very basic standard of education that we are simply failing to deliver on so many levels. Before anyone who knows me leaps to the defence of the local schools, I am aware that they are of a comparatively high standard, and that I am lucky, and I accept and realise that. The country as a whole though, is not as lucky. Travel for half an hour down the M1, and you will find schools that are systematically failing to deliver anything of worth to the children, because they are obsessed with SATS, and OFSTED visits rather than the real reason they are there.
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