So last time we finished with being dismissed by the second constultant we’d seen and so we struggled on. Day after day working hard to get our daughter into school. By the time she was in year one I had baby number three and was expecting baby four!

When she was in year one it became clear her teacher was great! He noticed she wasn’t picking up reading as easily as the others in the class and so he arranged for her to have an eye test that looked at her visual tracking. He even applied for the school to pay for it.

When we had the test, the results were a surprise. She was not able to follow text at all, her eyes were flicking all over the place, giving her no chance to actually read. We were referred for treatment, ten sessions at £30 a time. This time the school couldn’t help and there was no such treatment on the NHS. Fortunately family helped out.

I took her fortnightly with a toddler and baby in tow! The treatment was like physio for eyes. Painful at times for her but she worked hard and by the end there was a definite improvement.

The hope was that she would then have a dramatic improvement in her reading and writing. The possibility of dyslexia was floated but we were told she was too young for there to be a diagnosis. When she entered year three her teacher was again very kind but seemed to feel all our daughter needed was encouragement.

With some level of insistence we finally managed to get an assessment for dyslexia at the end of year 3 and her learning needs were discovered to be high but a referral for further help wasn’t recommended nor was any further intervention. Mostly motivated by the lack of money in the school and also the fact that she was well behaved and not causing a problem in class.

During year 4 we had to move house and decided to move schools in spite of the upheaval this would be for our kids. Maybe this change would be the way to get the help we knew we needed.

Up to this point we have been a pain to the SENco at the school, we have requested consultants appointments, we’ve been rejected as it has to come from the school, we’ve spoken to the GP who also said it had to come from the school. We’ve considered paying for a private assessment to find out how we can help our daughter get the best out of school but been told that a private assessment wouldn’t be accepted by the school.

We felt we were out of road. Our daughter continued to be a model student at school and yet not be progressing at all in her learning but hiding it so well the teachers, with the class of 30, weren’t able to focus on the needs of one well behaved child. I don’t blame them, they’re stretched so thin, it becomes those who shout the loudest get the help they need.

But there is hope. Next time I’ll write about what the turning point was.