It’s all so much different now. Today, teachers, schools and Local Education Authorities bend over backwards to help children with Developmental Co-ordination Disorder, also know as Dyspraxia1. Recently BBC Wales has been running a public awareness campaign for a charity called The Dyscovery Trust, which helps children with Dyspraxia in school. Back in the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s, when I was going through Secondary School and at Coventry Polytechnic, the condition was almost completely unheard of (not that many people have heard about it now), and I had a generally lousy time at school as a result. Many of my teachers thought I was lazy, or stupid or both and on one occasion, the Headmaster of Treorchy Comprehensive, Mr John Davies informed my parents that I would never pass a single GCE, let alone O’ Level. This is what spurred my mother on to find out exactly why I was doing so badly in school, and after a year of visiting the paediatric neurologist at the University of Wales Hospital in Cardiff, I was diagnosed as suffering from Dyspraxia. The school did the minimum it had to help me, I was excused from PE lessons so that I could catch up with my schoolwork. I was allowed to hand in work that had been typewritten instead of hand-written, and given a bare minimum of extra time in examinations. I was fortunate that in the mid-1980’s modern information technology was beginning to appear, which helped to alleviate my problems. Not that the school wanted me integrate with the rest of their pupils, I was too much like hard work. The major breakthrough came with the advent of the Microwriter. This was a very simple word processor with a chording keyboard that had two advantages over a typewriter, first it was portable fitting into a school bag and second it allowed me for the first time ever to keep up with my classmates. Naturally things were not perfect, my parents had to pay for all my IT equipment, today you can get all sorts of grants that were just dreams back then. So I completed my education at the local secondary school and moved onto Coventry Polytechnic. The institution, which went on to become Coventry University could cope with people with severe handicaps and learning difficulties, but didn’t know how to deal with me, who appeared so normal, and yet had so many underlying problems, such as the then undiagnosed Petit Mal Epilepsy. And so, after two years, I left full time education with a Diploma in Higher Education, and a firm desire never to do anything further in the realms of academia. However it is a funny old World, thanks to modern technology, I have overcome my problems, and I know that next year I will graduate. It has been hard work, but I will have done it.
Notes
1 Taken from the Dyspraxia Foundation Website http://www.dyspraxiafoundation.org.uk/an_overview.htm :
What is dyspraxia?
Dyspraxia is generally recognised to be an impairment or immaturity of the organisation of movement. Associated with this may be problems of language, perception and thought. Other names for dyspraxia include Clumsy Child Syndrome; Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD); Minimal Brain Dysfunction: Motor learning Difficulty; and Pereceptuo-motor Dysfunction. Problems include:
Perception
People who have dyspraxia tend to have poor understanding of the messages that their senses convey and difficulty in relating those messages to actions.
Thought
There may be difficulty in planning and organising thoughts.
Movement
Physical activities are hard to learn, difficult to retain and generalise, hesitant and awkward in performance.
Speech and Language
Speech may be immature or unintelligible in early years. Language may be impaired or late to develop. For some children, the primary difficulty is in making and co-ordinating the precise movements, which are used in the production of spoken language, which results in severe and persisting speech production difficulties. The condition is termed developmental verbal dyspraxia: it may occur in isolation or in conjunction with general motor difficulties.
Up to 10 per cent of the population may show symptoms of dyspraxia; and 2 per cent are severely affected by the condition. Of those diagnosed, 80 per cent are male.
Early recognition of dyspraxia enables a child’s special educational and social needs to be identified. Action can then be taken to reduce the impact of this condition on their whole family.
