Focus, starting, and ADHD

A clinician trained thoroughly in autism and ADHD may know almost nothing about coordination or reading difficulties, and can spend years working above foundations nobody ever checked. Ask yourself which of those categories your own training left out.

Go back over a handful of old cases rather than only reading about it. Where a child made less progress than you expected, ask what you never…

Processing speed is the stubborn one. It shifts a little with repeated, rhythmically paced practice and hardly at all with explanation, so say that to a family at the start rather than when they are disappointed.

Teaching a strategy will not make a slow processor quick, and telling a child to hurry up only makes the work more unpleasant. Graded practice with…

Assess, make a plan, do the work, and then keep measuring while you do it. Without that last part you have no way of knowing whether to push harder, change direction or stop.

Use more than one stream: your own measures, what parents notice at home, what school reports, and what the child says about it. Children will tell…

You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.

A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may…

Behaviour is usually the visible end of a skill that has not been built. What you are watching in a classroom is the shape of the difficulty rather than the shape of the child.

It is a single sentence you can say in a meeting, and it tends to move the conversation away from what to do about the behaviour towards what the…

Most children do not pick up reading by sitting near books. Around a fifth need very structured, repetitive teaching before it clicks, and about half of the rest still need a good deal of deliberate instruction, so structured teaching is the ordinary case rather than a special measure.

It helps to stop asking who qualifies for help and start asking how much teaching each child needs. A child left to fail badly enough to earn support…

When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.

One state moved from flat to clearly improved reading in years when many others slipped, and what changed was not the children but how teachers were…

Speech arrives on its own if a child is spoken to. Reading, writing and arithmetic do not, and it is no failing that they have to be taught piece by piece.

Children absorb talk from the people around them without lessons. Print is a much later invention and the brain has no ready made place for it, so it…

When a child keeps failing at a task, try reducing what it demands of attention and memory before you increase the practice. Shorter steps, one instruction at a time, the working written down where they can see it.

Attention, holding things in mind and switching between steps all set a ceiling on how much of a lesson gets through. You cannot easily raise that…

Pouring more in does not help while the lid is still on. A child who is exhausted, wound up or not yet settled will keep very little of the lesson, however good the lesson is.

Do the settling first, even when it costs ten minutes of the hour. Sleep, food, movement and a calm start look like the soft part of the day and they…

A child working words out from the pictures and the shape of the sentence is guessing well, not reading yet. It usually holds up until around the third year of school and then gives way, because the pictures stop and the words get longer.

Ask to hear the child read something with no illustrations and no predictable pattern. That is where you find out whether sounds and letters have…

Clapping games, skipping rhymes and silly verses are worth doing. They are good for the ear and they cost nothing, but they will not on their own repair a reading difficulty, and it is kinder to say so early.

Play the games, and separately get the structured teaching that a child with a real decoding problem needs. Families are often told that rhyming…

Invent words together. Say a made up word, pull it apart into its sounds, put it back, then take one sound out and hear what is left. The nonsense is the point, because there is nothing for memory to fall back on.

With a real word, a child who cannot work with sounds can often get by on memory, and you learn nothing about what they can actually do. A made up…

Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.

Move the sign about. Leave the gap in the middle, four plus something equals two plus five, and watch what the child does with it. If they add…

The word one does several jobs at once: a digit, a number, a single object, a whole set. A child who has not sorted those out will put figures in the wrong columns and later read a third as a number instead of a part of something.

When digits land in the wrong place, check whether the child knows what is being counted before calling it carelessness. Say the unit out loud: one…

A child who talks well, listens well and seems bright will have their reading failure read as laziness. The strengths are exactly what makes the blame stick.

Strong spoken language, decent attention and an easy manner give an impression of capability that nobody can square with work coming back unfinished.…

When the usual route into reading or arithmetic does not form, children build another one, and it nearly always runs through memory. It works for years, and it costs far more effort than anyone watching realises.

This is the bright child who is somehow always tired, always slow with written work, quietly memorising what everyone else is working out. The route…

In most children attention and memory sit at roughly the same level. When memory is far ahead of everything around it, ask what it has been quietly making up for.

Only fair attention with an unusually strong working memory is a signal rather than a strength to celebrate. The memory is carrying something. Look…

Ask someone to repeat a made up word and memory cannot rescue them. That is exactly why this small task keeps finding difficulties a clever, well practised person hides everywhere else.

Real words can be recalled, and a strong memory will lift a score without the skill underneath being there at all. A word that has never existed…

If a child is behind in reading, the gap rarely closes on its own with another year of the same. Asking for a proper assessment now is kinder than hoping that maturity will do the work.

National figures show reading proficiency barely shifting between primary school and the end of secondary, which tells you that catching up later is…