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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-08-05 Daily Xml
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Dyslexia

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (15:41): I rise today to talk about an issue that is very close to my heart and that of my family, and that is learning difficulties throughout primary and secondary education and, in particular, dyslexia. Dyslexia is a lifelong language-based learning difficulty, primarily affecting the skills involving accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. There is evidence that there is a small but significant proportion of students who do not catch up in reading, and are not what is termed 'instructional casualties' but identified as children with dyslexia.

There are approaches that have been taken in the UK, the US and Canada, referred to a response to intervention model, which helps to identify these children and how we can help to deal with them. It is estimated that approximately five to 10 per cent of Australian children and adults struggle daily with the implications of dyslexia.

This issue is very close to my heart because it is something that has struck my family in a reasonable way. About half my family exhibit signs of dyslexia, but especially my youngest brother. He is three years younger than me and, growing up, I took time out to try to help teach him how to read. To watch him struggle to rote learn every single word that he learned to read was difficult and it was a struggle. His amazing memory is a testament to how far he has come today. He also had a lot of help from a lot of one-on-one learning both in school and outside of school, especially at the primary school level and, as a family, we tried very hard to help him overcome it.

Having said that, throughout the latter parts of his schooling, my brother was failed by the schooling system. This issue is very difficult to deal with in a classroom setting, and I want to talk a little bit more about that. The reason I want to talk about this issue today is in light of a lot of the manufacturing jobs that we are losing in South Australia. As somebody who comes from a food manufacturing background, we have so many people who come and present for jobs and go into manual labour industries because of their inability to read and write that there is a group of people whose intelligence and talent we are not able to utilise because they have not been able to gain enough skills whilst at school to be able to participate more fully in the workforce. In light of the manufacturing jobs we are losing, it is precisely these people who are going to become more and more vulnerable as the skills required to get the available jobs are skills that they do not have.

In the Barossa and more broadly, there is an action group called DAGBAGS (or Dyslexia Action Group Barossa and Gawler Surrounds) who are really helping to bring this issue and broader learning difficulty issues to light in the Barossa and Gawler areas. DAGBAGS' mission is to equip schools and families to assist and support students with learning difficulties. DAGBAGS recently took out a top accolade at the SA Health Awards and was also a finalist in the community group category of the SA Regional Awards for the Barossa region.

I was lucky enough to meet with Dr Sandra Marshall and Kylie Fotheringham last week as they discussed with me some of the issues personal to their families and how they have gone about trying to educate and make the schools in my area and my electorate more aware of these issues. I want to say, though, that as I go and visit all of my schools within the Barossa, it astounds me how good is the level of education that exists in both the public and the private sector. We do genuinely have a number of world-class educators out there in Schubert and they are doing a fantastic job. The more I talk to them about tackling and dealing with these issues, the more I realise that there is a lot that has been done and a lot more that still needs to be done.

The current model is one where students are taken out of the normal schooling environment. There is a lot of one-on-one learning, but it is often done by LSOs or SSOs as opposed to the qualified teacher. It creates stigma around students who are taken out of classrooms and it creates a real perception issue that we need to get over. I think that there is a better model of differentiated learning where up to a quarter of the students within a classroom are under a differentiated model, identifying ways that dyslexic and other students with learning disabilities learn. There are better ways that we can go about helping this group within society to be able to achieve into the future.

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