Rewriting the Story

Head of 4^th Form at LWC, Rupert Davis, has a bone to pick with some much-loved storybook characters, but is keen to point out that we can all achieve a happy ending.

 

Confession time: I hate Biff and Chip, and while we’re at it, Kipper can take a hike too.

 

The reason I have such a vehement loathing of these characters (created in the late 80s by Roderick Hunt and whose stories have helped millions of children to become fluent readers) is that for me, they are associated with years of bitter humiliation.

 

This is no fault of their creator. The idea was that children would progress steadily through a rainbow of Biff and Chip books and emerge confident, even erudite, readers.

 

I, however, did not.

 

I expect it wasn’t a problem to begin with. We all set out to make our way through the dot-stickered books, from white to red. But before long, a clear range of reading ability starts to emerge in any class. In my case, I was clearly at the bottom of that range.

 

I was put on a table right at the front of the classroom where I could be watched closely. This was the table where the finger grips remained on all the pencils and the lined paper was forever a confusing barcode of red, green and blue guidelines. My table comrades were an extraordinary bunch and we all read books with little white dots on them.

 

As my peers progressed through the hierarchy of Biff and Chip, it became ever more obvious that I had not. I came to the inevitable and simple conclusion: I am slow.

 

I don’t think I consciously thought I was stupid, but I recognised it was taking me a while.

 

All the way through my early years at school, I became used to being the last to finish any academic task. Requirements to fill a certain number of pages filled me with dread. I became adept at skipping every other line, drawing the margin ludicrously far into the page and leaving thumb-width gaps following every punctuation mark.

 

My diagnosis of dyslexia (a panicked intervention by my parents) didn’t really change very much, but it did allow me to tell myself that I was not slow, but something else.

 

Steadily, my attitude shifted. I realised that despite finishing after everyone else and writing less than my peers, I had also been working harder than everyone else. I realised that whilst I couldn’t change how quickly I got things done, I could influence how hard I worked. My essays were unlikely to be the longest, but perhaps they could be the most interesting.  

 

This is no sob story, but I hope it serves to illustrate a couple of things. Firstly, that everyone has a different journey through education and it isn’t always the route that you expect.

 

It can be difficult to be a child with additional needs. I have experienced the suffering, the humiliation and the shame. I also know how hard it can be to shift their own self-perception and to recognise that what they have is not an indictment or a curse, but can be something that gives them strengths that others don’t possess.  

 

If you are someone who has to work twice as hard as some of your peers to achieve the same result, you learn to double your effort. If reading a page of text is twice as exhausting, you develop twice the endurance. If you have to spend twice as long writing, you will probably think twice as much about it, and it may well be twice as good.

 

All of us are capable of amazing things. Sometimes this is reflected in grades – often it is not. Children with additional needs live in a world where it can feel as though everyone else is finding it easy. More important than any adjustment or intervention, we must help our children realise that their brains are not a disadvantage, but a gift. As Head of 4^th Form at Lord Wandsworth College, this is something that I’m keen to impress on the young people rising through the school. 

 

Because the sky really is the limit, if you reframe how you think about it.