I am a qualified specialist teacher with more than 15 years’ experience of teaching ages 16 to 70+, through further and higher education. I am an Associate Member of the British Dyslexia Association (BDA). I hold an Assessment Practising Certificate (APC) from the Professional Association of Teachers of Students with Specific Learning difficulties (PATOSS). I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and have a Diploma in Dyslexia; Assessment, Literacy, Support and Intervention.
I’m also a mum to two boys! When we became parents, we found that both of our sons had difficulties at school – one struggled to engage with compulsory subjects in which he had no specific interest and struggled to make friends. The other struggled with learning to read and to shape his letters correctly when writing. We later discovered that our older son has an autistic spectrum disorder (previously known as Asperger’s syndrome) and our younger son is dyslexic.
As parents, the most frustrating thing has been trying to access support and timely intervention for our boys. We had very different experiences with each child – for our first son, his original early years teaching team showed limited knowledge or understanding of his difficulties and how to support him, so we had to switch primary schools. His catchment secondary school were not at all supportive and to protect his mental health and wellbeing, we made the decision once again to switch schools – but this was far from easy. For our younger son, his primary school teachers recognised his literacy difficulties and worked with us to get the right support in place. However, he too struggled at our catchment secondary school, so once again, we ended up changing secondary schools to ensure that he was supported and encouraged to achieve his full potential.
I want to help other families to better understand the nature of specific learning difficulties, how they affect individuals differently, and how to access the right support and intervention. As a qualified dyslexia assessor, I work with GoLexia, where we work with individuals and specialist toolkits to discover their cognitive strengths as well as areas in which they have difficulty, so that the right tuition, support, exam access arrangements or workplace adjustments can be put in place to help them reach their full potential. As a tutor, I can work one-to-one with my client, to overcome barriers to learning, improve their confidence and create appropriate strategies to enable them to achieve.
If you would like further information or advice, please call me on 07990 821730 and I will do my utmost to help.
To book a diagnostic assessment, via GoLexia, please visit their website: http://www.GoLexia.com, or telephone 07551 525954.
Barbara L Barnes, 