MP brands dyslexia a 'fiction'

I suppose MPs have to be provocative....  The latest to deny dyslexia is Manchester Labour MP Graham Stringer.  He claims that dyslexia  is a "myth invented by education chiefs to cover up poor teaching" and a "cruel fiction that should be consigned to the dustbin of history".  Not only is he simply wrong, but also he ignores a whole century of research that shows that dyslexia is caused by specific problems in brain development. 

Like Julian Elliot before him, he arrives at this opinion because old research shows that many dyslexics have problems with sorting out the sounds of letters, phonics.  He favours a programme called 'synthetic phonics' that requires 30 expensive hours of 1:1 teaching for each child, whereas everybody who's actually taught dyslexics knows that undiluted phonics for dyslexics is like flogging a dead horse.  It simply does not work!

He fails to consider the visual confusions from which so many dyslexics suffer, nor does he ask why anybody should have these difficulties at all. He ignores over 500 scientific publications in the last 10 years that show the importance of visual factors in dyslexia, and that these can cause to the phonological problems that he emphasises.

Thus he is unaware of the dramatic reading progress that many children can achieve simply by improving their visual reading skills using much cheaper techniques than 1 to 1 teaching,  such as wearing coloured filters, eye vergence exercises or temporary occlusion of one eye.