WRITTEN LANGUAGE is the central mechanism of our education system and, as a society, we expect our children to be fluent in the basic skills of reading, writing and spelling.

Society shows little compassion for slow starters - those children who, because they fail in the basic skills of written language, can find themselves struggling to survive in main stream education.

Dyslexic children are in this group. Until their learning difficulties are properly recognised and helped, dyslexic children may receive inappropriate help - or none at all -and become severely disadvantaged. When faced with the many obstacles to their educational success, dyslexic children are often mislabelled as lazy or stupid. This, in turn, can result in a negative attitude to education, where sheer frustration leads inevitably to under achievement.