Sarah Warley addressed call-in questions about dyslexia on ‘This Morning’ ITV

If you missed the recent live episode of #ThisMorning, (06/07/23) here's a transcript of the insightful conversation between our founder Sarah Warley and the callers discussing dyslexia.

First caller (Amy): My daughter (7) is being labelled as an ‘underachiever’

I’ve not really got any experience with dyslexia, my background is Special Social Needs but there is something that is a barrier to school. She always complains about injury going into school, she doesn’t like school, she has got no confidence at school but she’s got the willingness to try. So I am just wondering if they are signs of dyslexia and what I can do to help.

Sarah Warley: I also read that she had difficulty tying shoelaces, is that right?

First caller (Amy): Yes and I didn’t know if that was linked or not.

Sarah Warley: It’s totally linked, and people don’t often understand where and how the link happens. So what it indicates is that she probably has some primitive retained reflexes. What this means is that when we are born our brains are only around 20% developed and in that first year of life, you see babies making these little reflex movements - we all go through different phases of reflex movements - and those reflexes are creating ‘wiring’ in the brain and that’s needed to make a lot of what we do happen very simply, like on a sort of ‘auto-pilot’. 

By the time a child reaches their first birthday, the reflexes should have gone, so they should have integrated and finished their work. But, 9 times out of ten, when we find someone who is struggling with schoolwork or potentially struggling with spacial skills, when we test them, we find they still have these little baby reflexes in place and when they are there they mess everything up. So they mess up your balance, your coordination, your spacial awareness and they actually cause the eyes to jump when trying to read across a line of writing. So I suspect what’s happening, her inner gyroscope isn’t really working and the eyes are linked to that gyroscope and if it’s not working it’s going to have all those sorts of impacts on her.

To get a diagnosis you need to see an Educational Psychologist, so you’ll go there and they will carry out lots of different assessments and you will then get that diagnosis. Which can mean extra learning support, extra time in exams etc. The other type of assessment is looking at what the underlying causes really are and that’s where you would be doing testing to see if there are any retained primitive reflexes and also testing to look at the Auditory processing. 

Craig (host): What’s the role of the school in terms of spotting it and helping with it afterwards?

Sarah Warley: What tends to happen is it tends to be teachers noticing that there is a mismatch between  how smart a child is and what they can actually get down onto paper; what they can translate down. The good thing is that schools are no longer saying ‘You need to try harder’ or ‘You need to focus more’ they’re actually picking up when there is a problem going on. They’ll get the assessment and then they will put in the extra time and support, having breaks when needed for that. So it is picked up better but it’s not picked up nearly well enough and I think they should be screening across the entire year group, I don’t think they should be waiting until a problem is flagged.

Second query (John) - I’ve lost all of my confidence because of dyslexia.

I’ve been suffering with it all my life. I’m in a good job however my work colleagues are not aware that I suffer from dyslexia. When I’m at work and have to do a presentation to senior members of staff, I get really nervous, my anxiety levels go through the roof. I’m starting to think my dyslexia is really holding me back - what can I do to get my confidence back?

Sarah Warley: The first thing is there are many side effects of dyslexia. Losing confidence is perhaps the number one that people do. Kids can also become very disruptive in class, they can act like the class clown, they can disengage but there are loads of other side effects with it. But it is also a super power - which may sound like a really weird thing to say, but when your Dyslexic your brain is wired differently and you’ve got better interconnectedness, so you’re going to be much better than your colleagues at seeing the big picture and being able to problem solve with that. 

It’s interesting that often people with dyslexia are very good orators, so you may not think you are, Winston Churchill had dyslexia! So you are probably much better than you think and what you're carrying is this memory of dyslexia that has made you feel like you can’t do these things but actually you’ve got a lot of incredible skills that would be extraordinarily valuable in the workplace, and things that can’t be matched by IT and AI. 

Craig (host): We don’t talk about the positives enough, and ADHD is the same. There are so many super powers with ADHD - all these things have fantastic traits.

Holly (host): I think you start to lose confidence if you try and keep up with the classic way of doing things, the classic way of spelling, the classic way of writing, the classic way of talking. But if you just go ‘As long as I’m communicating in my own way and people are understanding’ - and often it’s a more natural way of speaking - then you don’t lose confidence over it.

Third Caller (Sarah) - How do I get my daughter (11) more support?

She struggles mostly with her reading and it’s how I can support her at home with this and what support, if any, is available outside of school. School do a really fantastic job with her but they don’t have the resources to give her one to one support or anything like that, so it’s what I can do at home really.

Sarah Warley: 90% of people diagnosed with dyslexia just happen to have on particular type of reflex - an ATNR - it actually has a much longer name but they are ridiculous the names. There are Neurodevelopmental exercises you can do with your daughter, you have to do them in a slow, controlled way, every single day for around 10-15 minutes. What we are doing in saying ‘the nervous system didn’t quite develop as it should first time round, let’s turn back the clock, give it a second chance and restimulate’. So you do these exercises every day and  eventually that reflex throws in the towel and it goes, and that’s how you get breakthroughs in functioning, so it is possible to look at the underlying factors.

The other thing I didn’t mention is, there is always an issue with how information is being heard as well and again, I think this is an area that sometimes gets misunderstood. Often we have parents come to us and say ‘We’ve done a hearing test, my child has no problems with their hearing’, and what they mean is that there is no hearing loss, but the question is how is that child hearing language. 

What we find with dyslexia is a pattern known as Dyslateral Hearing, that means when you are listening to words, you are jumping from one ear to the other to tune into different sounds within a word. That has totally weird effect on language, it actually reverses the order of phonemes within sound for example, I might say ‘cat’ and you might hear ‘act’ - if you are tuning into your right ear the A would have ‘bam’, straight there got processed but the C was doing this big journey. 

So you write it the wrong way, you’re told you’re rubbish at spelling - I seem to be dyslexic - but actually it’s how you’re hearing. You can rewire that, you can change that - you can do a course of Auditory Integration Training which is customised around your hearing pattern and you can change it.