Our Approach
Overcoming Dyslexia and Unlocking Potential at Maple Hayes
Understanding Dyslexia and Its Impact
Dyslexia, specific learning difficulty, or word blindness—whatever you choose to call it—affects around one in ten schoolchildren to varying degrees. This challenge can lead to underachievement in written language, which doesn’t reflect their true intelligence. Unfortunately, this often results in a failure to obtain qualifications, limiting their opportunities to showcase their talents in both their personal development and contribution to society and industry.
Specific difficulties with reading and spelling aren’t tied to socio-economic background. While a diagnosis can provide some reassurance to dyslexic children by showing them they are not less capable than their peers, finding a solution to this condition has proven much harder. Many studies have focused on identifying the cause of dyslexia or predicting reading difficulties in young children, but this hasn’t led to significant advancements in treatment.
A New Approach to Teaching
At Maple Hayes, we’ve taken a different approach. Instead of focusing on the cause, we have concentrated on how children with dyslexia process the written word. We discovered that many of these children try to make sense of words through purely visual methods or attempt to convert letters to sounds at a low, often meaningless level. Good readers, on the other hand, don’t show this bias, processing both sight and sound together efficiently.
The key to helping dyslexic children lies in either teaching them to integrate sound and symbols more effectively or bypassing the sound/symbol issue altogether. Traditional methods, which heavily focus on phonics, have shown limited success, particularly in the long term. So, at Maple Hayes, we’ve explored an alternative strategy that removes the focus on sounding out words.
By developing a teaching method that emphasises sight recognition, spelling, and—crucially—the meaning of words, we have seen remarkable progress. Our approach allows dyslexic students to grasp longer, more complex words that often trip them up in written language but not in speech. This method has not only proven successful in practice but is now gaining support from wider research.
Many dyslexic children struggle to express their thoughts in writing, producing short sentences and paragraphs due to their difficulty with spelling and the slow pace at which they write. Their written work often lacks both quantity and quality, leading to unfair assumptions about their intellect. At Maple Hayes, our method ensures that children can continue to progress in all areas of the curriculum without sacrificing important lessons for remedial catch-up sessions.
Enabling Future Success
Incorporating our method into the broader curriculum allows children with dyslexia, who are often highly intelligent and excellent spatial or visual thinkers, to excel. Their unique problem-solving abilities and unconventional ways of thinking can make them invaluable in fields like industry and technology—if they can overcome the barriers posed by written language.
Throughout history, many notable engineers, inventors, and scientists have been dyslexic. By using their strengths rather than focusing on their weaknesses, today’s underachieving youngsters have the chance to fulfil their potential in a normal, inclusive school environment. At Maple Hayes, we offer them the tools to succeed both academically and beyond.
Dr Neville Brown
Co-Principal and Proprietor
-
Pupils who come to us have had great difficulty in learning their letter sounds, in splitting up the oral word into syllables and the syllables into their component sounds or ‘phonemes’, and in getting these sounds and their letters in the right order when spelling words. These problems are very common in younger children. The dyslexic child has extreme difficulties in learning to read and write by phonics and these difficulties persist beyond the age of 7 or 8.
-
Usually
Indications that the child is ‘lazy’ or a ‘late developer’
Often
Slow reading so that the sense is lost
Slow writing, use of restricted vocabulary of small words
Cannot spell longer words
Sometimes
Reversed, rotated or twisted letters when writing
Clumsiness, left-handedness, difficulty in telling left from right
A family history of learning difficulties
Difficult in learning tables and lists in the right order
Always
A widening discrepancy between the child’s intelligence and their performance in reading and/or spelling using the conventional phonic methods of teaching
-
We specialise in teaching methods which lead away from a dyslexic's area of weakness and build on their strengths with a range of targeted teaching strategies which do not involve phonics or multi-sensory methods. We provide a good all-round education without the stigma of withdrawal to a special unit and our youngsters compete well in the Midland and National Independent School sports championships. Pupils generally come to Maple Hayes around the age of 10 or younger so that we have the opportunity to improve their literacy and to enable them to take a range of GCSE’s commensurate with their intellectual ability. Our Ofsted report says “ the school’s approach to teaching dyslexic pupils to read, write and spell is very effective. Pupils make great gains in reading accuracy, fluency and spelling. They also write very legibly in a good cursive style. All this means that across the curriculum the quality of presentation of their work is excellent and that their literacy skills support their learning in other subjects”.
-
Raise pupils’ self-esteem, self-confidence and expectation of academic success by giving them a fresh start in the acquisition of literacy.
Enable pupils to become independent, pro-active learners so that they may compete with their intellectual peers in the education system.
Nurture pupils in a caring school community where each individual feels valued and included, and participates within an ethos of tolerance and mutual respect rooted in Christian values.