The dyspraxia myth

Forget about an academic education for your son," announced the form teacher. "He's not clever enough." Unexpectedly, the annual parents' evening at the private school in north London, charging £3,500 a term, had become a nightmare.

"Send him to a low-grade secondary school and take him to an educational psychologist," directed the teacher about my nine-year-old son.

"Why?" I asked, staggered by the startling directive. "Don't you know? He's dyspraxic." Bewildered by the middle-aged teacher's judgment, I wanted to ask a dozen questions, but the annual session was terminated. "I haven't any more time," she declared. After barely three minutes, I was dismissed from the room.

That abrupt exchange started four years of misery and the progressive humiliation of a boy convinced by psychologists and his teachers that he was suffering a brain defect which permanently impaired his intelligence.

As I was to learn, dyspraxia is the new dyslexia, a medical term now bandied about by both parents and teachers who sometimes use it as an excuse for academic underachievers.

Technically, it is a condition affecting a person's judgment of space, and manifests itself in the child's inability to understand how to juxtapose shapes such as triangles and squares, or by their hapless failure to co-ordinate their physical movements. There is no cure, say the experts, but treatment and conditioning allegedly help.

Clearly, a proportion are genuine sufferers - but others are children who have been categorised for a brutal reason. Namely, that private schools prefer to blame the child than admit to teaching inadequacies in their schools. To protect second-rate teachers, private schools prefer to label those casualties of inadequate teaching as "dyspraxic".

Yet far from being dyspraxic, by the end of four years, my son was declared to be completely healthy and academically excellent. In the meantime, his self-confidence had been undermined, his education had been damaged and I had spent nearly £20,000 on a small army of private teachers and educational psychologists.

Just how the educated parents of four children, paying huge fees to a London private school, could believe the "classification" of their child as dyspraxic is a woeful tale, and my experience is not unique.

Parents in London paying to extricate their children from poor state education have also become the victims of incompetent teachers and self-interested psychologists. Fearful of challenging the headmasters and teachers, parents are quietly accepting bogus diagnoses rather than risk the expulsion of their children from school.

Not surprisingly, the form teacher's diagnosis of my child was alarming. Nevertheless, her conclusion appeared initially to be justified. Indeed, his educational performance was lacklustre. Compared to others of his age, his reading, arithmetic and retention of knowledge was poor. Unlike his two older siblings who would all be accepted at prestigious Oxford colleges with outstanding A-levels, his attainment at eight years old had been considerably lower than required. Indeed, I had been puzzled by his failure to develop but was not overly worried.

After all, I reassured myself, children develop different skills at different rates, and he was a very gregarious boy, a great raconteur.

The teacher's prognosis seemed decisive. "His IQ," she declared "is very low." Yet I still harboured doubts. Rather than make an appointment with the educational psychologist nominated by the school, I consulted personal friends who are shrinks. On their recommendation, I took my son to his first educational psychologist in Finchley. I returned, as ordered, 90 minutes later. She appeared flustered. "I need another 40 minutes," she said. Then she explained her confusion. "Orally, his IQ is very high, but his written IQ is low." She could not explain the discrepancy.

Another friendly shrink was visited with the same puzzling result. Finally, I succumbed to the school's educational psychologist. She was stern and emphatic. "Dyspraxia," she pronounced. There was no cure but there were lessons to teach the boy how to cope. I was referred to another expert.

So began 18 months of after-school sessions with puzzles and videos, complemented by special teaching from two other psychologists to teach reading. In addition, most evenings a tutor came to the house to help my son with his homework - the cost was phenomenal. By the end of the second year, the situation was probably worse. He was in the bottom set at school and scored miserable marks in exams. He was below the border line to pass the common entrance. Then came enlightenment.

"Your son," announced one educational psychologist suddenly, "is not dyspraxic." "What?" I exclaimed. "He just hasn't been taught maths," she continued. "It has undermined his self-confidence to learn everything else at school." The revelation was astounding. She recommended a maths tutor.

"Most of my work," the maths tutor told me "is with pupils from your son's school. They can't teach maths." Neither could he.

Desperate, I was told about a maths tutor who it was said could perform miracles, at £90 per hour. To save my son, there was no choice.

"No one has taught him maths," announced the miracle worker, "and he's got no self-confidence." Teachers at the school, he discovered, regularly humiliated my son because of his poor results. "Can you do anything?" I pleaded. "Oh, yes," he said. It was October. The exams were in June.

Over the following eight months I witnessed the most astonishing transformation. A cowed child became a confident student. Understanding maths transformed his mastery of every other subject. His common entrance mark in maths was 83 per cent and he achieved five A grades (over 75 per cent) with the rest Bs (over 65 per cent).

When I cautiously raised with one or two other parents the rather sensitive subject of poor teaching in the school, I was amazed by the response. Oh didn't you know, 75 per cent of the boys doing Common Entrance have private tuition at home? Nobody had declared their hand until after the exams. And when I told my story to an old friend, Anne Alvarez, a well known child psychologist, she told me: "Dyspraxia and other labels put on children are often too loosely used. Many diagnostic labels are used as wastebaskets."

Our son's headmaster recently announced the appointment of a new maths teacher. We later learned that this new teacher had not even passed A-level maths.