Learning Difficulties

Not all disabilities are immediately apparent and whilst in Britain there are an estimated 350,000 children with conventional disabilities, the Department for Education estimates that in England alone there are a staggering 1,600,000 children currently suffering with learning difficulties.  The overwhelming majority of these children do not receive one-to-one tuition nor are they being taught using special teaching techniques or equipment, such as multi-sensory teaching methods and computer based learning programs.

Furthermore, dyslexic children are usually taken out of national curriculum studies to attend special needs classes designed for children who are academically challenged, virtually ensuring that they fall further and further behind.

Our dyslexic teaching centre gives one-to-one tuition free of charge to every child who attends.

Although, there is now a very large waiting list of children waiting to attend.  The centre also provides free assessments, support, counselling and specialist advice to parents and this is particularly important when they first discover that their child is dyslexic.  The centre is also the prototype to be used as a blueprint on which to base more centres in the future.

British Dyslexics understands the fundamental importance of ensuring that each and every child is allowed to achieve self fulfilment.  Surely as Britain reaches the millennium, this should not be based on a parents ability to pay for extra help.

Multi-Sensory Learning

Over recent years research has consistently demonstrated that the most effective method of teaching dyslexic children is through a structured multi-sensory teaching approach.  The technique uses visual, auditory and kinaesthetic inputs which are combined and reinforced in a way that helps children to overcome their learning difficulties.  Conventional teaching techniques only tend to confuse dyslexic children.  This is believed to be because of incompatibility problems between different systems in the brain.  This causes the senses to fail 'to work together' correctly when processing language.  The result can be a complete failure to understand the intricate and often contradictory rules of the English language.

If dyslexic children do not receive the correct type of help they are not generally able to learn automatic responses to letters and words in their written form.  However, by using a technique such as Multi-sensory learning which insist on the simultaneous use of eyes, ears, voice and hands, the brain receives the same information from all the relevant senses and is forced to process the information in a more whole and correct way.

Multi-sensory learning is a structured approach to teaching by using reinforcing techniques this ensures that a child learns the ability to handle a relatively small number of sounds and symbols before progressing through the language, building on what is already known.  This helps reduce the fear of failure and ridicule that tends to dominate the learning process of all dyslexic children.  However, these negative feelings gradually begin to disappear as children overcome their disability and success becomes more and more frequent.

Parents and teachers are encouraged to build on the automatic responses which are developed through all the activities of multi-sensory learning both at school and at home.  As dyslexic children overcome their learning difficulties they often retain additional skills and abilities which they develop in response to coping with their dyslexia.  These may include unusual creative skills, highly developed visual memories and exceptional abilities in creative and lateral thinking.