This year has seen the expansion of Visual Reading into new areas. Up to the end of 2022, Visual Reading had been primarily focused on students in receipt of the Disabled Students Allowance (DSA). The challenge there being raising awareness amongst Assessors of Need who have control over the allocation of resources. This proved rather difficult because almost all Assessors of Need work independently on zero hours contracts, meaning that it is difficult to provide awareness raising to groups. We have also had Assessors of Need proclaiming that our results are too good to believe. It is difficult to know what to do about that!
So this year, while maintaining our DSA work, we have been focused on raising awareness among dyslexia specialist teachers. I started the year with providing a couple of presentations on the Praxis-cpd website, run by my wonderful colleague Sally-Ann Morrison, about Visual Reading and the implications for assessment practice when most neurodivergent people think visually and process information holistically. These presentations generated a great deal of interest in becoming approved coaches. This was followed by a Zoom presentation during Neurodiversity Week to SOAS.
We initially offered free coaching and provided it to over 30 dyslexia specialists, many of whom worked in schools rather than FE or HE. We also provided free coaching to a dyslexia specialist in Mallorca and another in Mississippi, USA. This particular dyslexia specialist is dyslexic. We have and will continue to prioritise neurodivergent coaches. On completing the Visual Reading course, she gave this feedback,
“Thank you so much! I really enjoyed your class! I am thrilled to learn that I am not doomed to being a slow reader after all at the age of 60! It is exhilarating to sit down to read now! What a huge help this would have been when I was in school!”
Providing free coaching is not, of course, sustainable in the long run, and we now charge a subsidised fee (currently £80). We also found that free coaching was sometimes not always as valued as coaching that has a financial cost by some. We continue to receive requests for this coaching the coaches course and are delighted that their work with neurodivergent readers is generating similar results to our own.
One of the reasons we wanted to develop approved Visual Reading coaches was because we anticipate a large increase in demand once Visual Reading becomes better known, and we wanted to develop a pool of coaches we could call on..
For the past year we have been working closely with Mark Smith who is the owner of Fixedpips.com who started by developing an App to provide Structured Saccade Overlays to screens and ended up building our new interactive website, all for nearly zero cost. We can’t thank him and his company enough! The website will continue to be developed during 2024 provided not just information and sales, but an interactive portal we hope all approved coaches will find useful. Our results will also be able to be updated in real time. All very exciting.
Meanwhile we have supported Jamie Wace’s attempt to build a dyslexia screener that he hopes will become a relatively cheap online assessment tool in the fullness of time, giving better access to assessment reports that open the resource gates to those who currently can’t afford an assessment. We have also had positive feedback from Professor John Stein and Dr Teri Lawton (who both espouse the Magnocellular Theory of dyslexia).
We have plans to offer some free coaching to children in care and to those in prison or probation in 2024, as our resources permit.
Finally, I will be giving a Presentation on Visual Thinking and the implications for the assessment and teaching of children as well as adults to the Enfield and Barnett PATOSS Association on 30 January, 2024 at 8pm.
