‘Educational trauma’: Why our schools are failing dyslexic kids

Dyslexic children sometimes see words or letters jumping off the page. Photo / Catherine Falls Commercial
The school system and how well the curriculum serves Kiwi kids has come under a lot of scrutiny lately – with Government promises to lift our falling rates by focusing on the basics: reading, writing and maths.
But for many dyslexic learners, the basics are the hardest part.
Twenty-three-year-old Michael McWilliams is dyslexic. He says subjects like maths and English are a nightmare.
“It was like a living hell being at school for me,” he says.
Michael left school at 15, feeling like a failure – a feeling that hasn’t left him despite becoming a successful entrepreneur, buying and selling supercars.
In this week’s edition of No Such Thing as Normal, he spoke to Sonia Gray about his struggles, and successes.
“I felt like I was the dumbest person in school … You know when you’re in class … doing tests and stuff. And everyone’s got their head down, they’re writing. And then you hear books start closing, and then people go up and give the book to the teacher at the front.
“And then I’d say, I’d be on the first page still, ‘I don’t know what the heck I’m doing’. And it was the pressure from other people finishing before me.
“And not only did I finish last out of them all, but I was sitting there sort of feeling really stupid, because everyone was looking back at me like, ‘Oh, we’re still going because this kid is on his first page?’”
But often it’s the way dyslexic kids are taught to read that’s the problem.
Dr Ruth Gibbons is a Massey University Social Anthropology lecturer who dedicates much of her research to dyslexia.
“There’s an assumption about how reading is learnt and the best ways to teach it,” she says.
“I have a lot of dyslexics who learnt to read before they went to school. At school, they lost the ability to read because they were taught a particular way.”
From next year, all schools will be mandated to use the structured literacy approach, a phonics method that has long been lobbied for by some people in the dyslexic community as a better way to learn.
But Dr Gibbons says it’s not that simple.
“If we do only one way and assume that all dyslexics will be better if it’s all done in some way, that’s not going to work. It’s never going to work … Because for some people, yes, the words move on the page. For other people, they do not. For some people, phonics is fantastic, and it works really well for them. For some dyslexics, phonics is a disaster, and actually what they would rather have is a context … So it’s about finding what works best for them.”
And she says for some dyslexic minds, while the words might not move, they do come alive on the page.
“The way they read is incredibly sensorially dense … so they get kind of sucked into the book and it becomes alive, and they can feel things like, if the wind blows in the book, they feel that on their skin.”
She says maths can also be a problem because it’s often taught in a very linear way, which doesn’t work well for dyslexic thinkers.
Michael hated maths in school but in his job, he has no problem with it.
“I deal with numbers all the time because of all the cars and whatnot, but that’s because I’m interested, and that’s because I want to … If I’m doing it for some equation I wouldn’t have a clue,” he says.
“Actually, that’s common for quite a few dyslexics,” says Dr Gibbons. “They will have the answer, but the working is not something that’s good for them.”
Showing the steps and how you got to an answer is where dyslexic learners often struggle.
“You’re taught [that] actually, yes, you got the right answer, but no, you got the wrong answer because you didn’t show all of your working in the correct way. [Which] means that you’re being told, yet again, that you aren’t valuable, that you don’t do things right. That you need to do things a particular way.”
Michael still feels irate, even though it’s been almost 10 years since he left school.
“I’m angry because of it. Because I feel it, you know, doing anything, any day-to-day tasks when I feel pressure. I feel the same feeling as what I felt in school. And that makes me angry. (I) can’t get away from it at all.”
And of course, he’s not alone. He’s one of thousands of dyslexic learners who the school system has failed.
Dr Ruth Gibbons says these people experience an enormous amount of shame, anxiety and low self-esteem.
“There are studies that prove that. Alexander Passe … found over 64% of dyslexics have PTSD and that was caused by their experience of education.
“It’s educational trauma.”
No Such Thing as Normal is a NZ Herald podcast, hosted by Sonia Gray, with new episodes available every Saturday.
Season One won Best History & Documentary Podcast at the 2024 NZ Radio and Podcast Awards, and was one of Apple Podcast’s Most Shared series in 2023.
The series was made with the support of NZ on Air.
You can listen to it on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.