In the last few weeks of lockdown, we have been advising and supporting 2 people who have received statements.  The first person I would like to mention is a 54-year-old man who had been sent to a clinical psychiatrist during the lock-down period.  He had received no help or support although having been statemented and The Cascade Foundation was brought in to help.

The second person is a 30-year-old man who had been statemented at university, passed his qualification and was still unable to read and write 20 years later.  He had never received any support whilst at the university to help him with his dyslexia.  I would now like to share my story of my time at university.

I had always been a great entrepreneur for selling, buying, importing and exporting goods, but could never transfer my thoughts into writing.  The year was 1998 and my two sons had been involved in a very serious car accident, leaving my youngest with a severe head injury for whom I would become a carer.  Looking towards the future I realised that my career would have to change to a 9-to-5 office job.  This was particularly hard for me because of my difficulty with spelling and grammar and I had no understanding of why.

My two amazing friends Jean and Don had introduced me to a Mac computer which was to open up my world, computers were the future.  At the age of 14 I had learnt how to touch type but of course if a letter had been written by freehand, I could not always understand the spelling, but now with the use of computer tools, it could help me with spelling and grammar, so how was I to learn?

Whilst caring for my son, I enrolled on many short IT courses and I would just scrape through each qualification.  Every college I attended told me the next course would help me, it would show me what my issues were.  I took the course ‘IT for All’ at Southend College and again just scraped through the qualification.  After speaking with the college advisors, they suggested that I would benefit from enrolling on a longer course which was 14 hours a week.  Here I would be allocated a tutor and with weekly tutorials I would be given one-to-one tuition, giving me the opportunity to talk through my concerns and learning issues with my tutor.

This is where the amazing Sue Blackburn changed my life, she listened, and she could see various patterns building up and asked me if I had thought of having an assessment for dyslexia.  I took her advice and went along to the Academic Support team where an assessment took place, and I was tested for English and maths.  Five weeks later we were still waiting for the results.  I was getting anxious at this point as my first assignment would soon be due.  Sue suggested that I go straight to the student advisors where I was given the results of my assessment, the results showing that I had a severe case of dyslexia.  From this day I was amazed to see how I could recognise characteristics of dyslexia.  The summer holiday break was approaching which meant that I would have to wait until September to continue my course.  I spent much of my time at Southend library where I read everything about dyslexia, multi-intelligences, multi–sensory and NLP.  On my return in September, I was given an in-house test and the outcome of this was to allow me an extra 20 minutes for my assessment and an assistant to read my work.

I started a BA degree to become a Special Educational Needs Coordinator.  In five weeks, I was struggling with the fact that I had not received a statement. I felt that I had been overlooked. I was sent straight away by the college to the clinical psychiatrist’s home. I was told by the psychiatrist that this was very unusual practice for a student to be sent to her home.

The assessment lasted for 2½ hours.  I had taken newspaper clippings of my achievements throughout my life which included importing, manufacturing and publishing.  In spite of this I still felt so useless and a failure looking back over my life.  I began to understand more about self-harming and domestic abuse, it was all there.  I had several relationships that had not worked, and my marriage had only lasted seven years.  I never felt good enough and this was the reason why I felt so different from anybody else, like an alien dropped on this earth, I also felt so much hurt for everybody and for the world.

At the end of the assessment the assessor commented to me that she felt that one day both her and I would work together.  After days of crying, I understood everything about my childhood, how my sister could read and write and spell so much faster than l.  I always felt that I lived in a daydream and a bubble where I felt happy and safe.  Now I was exposed to the outside world and I felt so vulnerable.  How could I be able to attend university feeling so useless?  I had nobody to talk to or to understand me.  In the 60s I was always segregated from my friends at school.  I was taken to a room away from the others down a long corridor where I would sit with the teacher who would go over and over the same things, but I never could understand it.

After I was given my statement, I then had to go to a London university for help with my equipment.  This took place after an interview where I had to discuss my life from when I was a child, to relationships and employment.  All this was to help provide me with adequate resources for this course which consisted of a scroll, laptop, software and printer.

After discussing this at length, I could feel how frustrated I had become in my life, and at times feeling very suicidal.  I questioned whether I could finish the course, was I good enough, was there anything I could achieve?  In the statement it was noted that my level of literacy and grammar was of an 8-year-old, and to be at university I would need a literacy level of an 11-year-old, so how could I pass these qualifications?  Eventually against all odds I was achieving the qualifications, much to the bewilderment of other students who felt that my results were either a ‘fluke’ or that I had cheated.  How was it possible for a dyslexic person to be achieving higher grades than others within the group?  This caused me to feel excluded from the rest of the class.

Going back to university they were now going to help me with one-to-one teaching which I had been receiving since the age of five.  I soon started to realise that it was not the individual teaching but the way I was being taught, I needed something different.  While I was working with my son Stuart after his head injury, I became familiar with multi-sensory learning and while helping him with spelling in the sand in the water I realised that I was retaining this information.

Since my own experience I have endeavoured to support other individuals who were awaiting to be assessed for a statement by accompanying them to the assessment.  I helped to prepare them for what to expect during the assessment and praised them for not giving up.  From their results I was able to work with them to set up a plan to help them to understand their own individual way of learning and dealing with their specific learning difficulties.

In 2008 my project within Chelmsford prison had to come to an end due to a long-term illness.  I was completing a six-week course of hypnotherapy.  We discussed my results of dyslexia and how frustrated I felt with the statement and its conclusion.  It was so difficult to read about my difficulties that I felt even more of a failure.  My Hypnotherapist suggested that we needed to work on this.  It was now four years after the statement had been written.  Subsequently I then started my first project in Chelmsford prison helping over 2,000 prisoners, I had appeared on television and was now being honoured in the House of Lords, by Lord Addington.  My drive and determination had shown me that the experts were wrong.

I became involved with many people who had also felt suicidal, thinking that they could not move on with their lives.  After reading the story of Jay Blades from TV’s ‘The Repair Shop’, he received a statement for dyslexia 20 years ago, at the Buckinghamshire New University as a mature student where he applied to study criminology.  Sadly, he did not pass the course, mainly due to the lack of support to help him to fully understand his dyslexia, and how to work with it.  Moving forward to present day he is now working on three television programs.  He is having much difficulty because he cannot read his scrips or retain his lines. 

Jay Blades, presenter of The Repair Shop

During lockdown I was invited to visit a company by a manager who had noticed that one member of staff was struggling with dyslexia.  It had cost the company £750 for an assessment to take place online.  The man in question was 54 years old, he had always known that something was wrong.  It had taken him a long time to read and process information.  Whilst in lock down he was on his own and tried to take his own life, ending up in hospital.  The company had heard about the work of The Cascade Foundation.  Our first session was for him to understand his strength and skills and how to process information in his own individual way.  This was his feedback on his first session:

‘It was wonderful to meet you, I think you are an extraordinary human being.

It is inspiring and delightful, to see altruistic and selfless people like you, who constantly put others’ needs and wants before their own’.

During my time working in a woman’s prison, I discussed with the education management and experts how I used to self-harm, my anorexia, how I suffered domestic violence in my relationships and how I felt very suicidal.  I was asked ‘what is this to do with dyslexia’? and also ‘how do you have such empathy with our women prisoners when you have come from a good home?’  For many years I was told that my thinking about mental health with learning disabilities was wrong.  In 2012 I met with Dr Neil Alexander-Passe who himself is dyslexic.  He published the book, ‘Dyslexia and Mental Health: Helping People Identify Destructive Behaviours and Find Positive Ways to Cope’ (2015).  He has published 10 books to help discover the trauma that many dyslexics experience at school, and any emotional ramifications that follow impacting on mental health.  I was so pleased that my ideas regarding mental health issues had been validated.

I struggled with many relationships, my marriage only lasted seven years and I never remarried.  The positive result from my marriage are my two beautiful children and I learnt to drive.  I was willing to support my then husband to climb the ladder with his army career, but unfortunately this was not reciprocated, much to the surprise of many of our army friends.  At the start of our marriage, he encouraged me and helped me to read the Sun newspaper to him every night, but he could not understand why I could not retain the information the next day.  I was able to resolve any issues to problems very quickly, leaving him more frustrated.

I found working for a company hard, I would see all the challenges of the business and staff, I would rearrange the whole system, implementing new policies and changing courses.  They would now have a template to follow for the future of the business.  After six months, I am looking for a new challenge which is how the Charity was formed.  I had been waiting for 13 years to start my own charity, Sir Bernard Brain had told me in the 80’s that I should think of myself before I give to others, but that is what makes me happy!

Our Charity, The Cascade Foundation was set up not just to help people to read and write, but to help them understand the whole picture of being dyslexic.  I find so many experts focus on reading and writing without exploring the impact this has on our everyday lives.  They overlook the baggage that we carry, such as the suicidal thoughts and the feeling of being different.  The latest news I have received from a prison is a new innovation of an ‘amazing pen’ which is going to help every dyslexic prisoner.  This is rubbish!  We have to understand ourselves first, then our strengths and weakness to use techniques to understand how we process information.  Our drive, determination and method of problem-solving is not always understood.  Our projects have changed the lives of hundreds and thousands of people who have come to believe in themselves.  We are all individuals who learn at different speeds and different paces.  We are a force to be reckoned with.