New Research - Dyslexia
A new UK definition of dyslexia
I wanted to share this one because it is already being operationalised in the UK as part of granting extra time and other exam accommodations. It will help you, as a parent, understand more about decisions being made for your child.
A large panel of dyslexia experts has agreed on a shared definition of dyslexia for the first time. They also agreed on how it should be identified.
The researchers ran a two-round survey with 58 experts from the UK and 13 other countries. The panel included academics, educational psychologists, specialist teachers and assessors, and dyslexic adults. Each expert rated a set of statements about how dyslexia should be defined, and statements that at least eight in ten experts agreed on were kept. That's a high bar, set deliberately so the final definition reflects real agreement rather than a narrow majority. Statements that split opinion were reworked and put to the panel again. Forty-two statements reached that level of agreement.
What did they agree?
Dyslexia is best understood as a set of processing difficulties that make learning to read and spell harder. In everyday terms, that means the brain finds it harder to link letters to their sounds, or to hold a word in mind long enough to read it smoothly. It can affect word finding and sentence construction.
It isn't a single, fixed condition with one clear cause. It sits on a spectrum of severity, rather than being something a child either has or doesn't have. A child with only mild difficulty and a child who struggles daily can both be dyslexic. They simply sit at different points on the same scale.
Several things can contribute to it, working together rather than any one on its own. Difficulty processing the sounds within words is the most common factor, but it doesn't explain every child's difficulty on its own.
Dyslexia often comes alongside other conditions, including ADHD, developmental language difficulties and dyscalculia. A child with dyslexia might also have ADHD, for instance, and the panel treated that kind of overlap as ordinary rather than unusual.
How dyslexia manifests will change as a child gets older. A seven-year-old still learning letter sounds and a fifteen-year-old who reads slowly but accurately can both fit the same underlying pattern.
The panel didn't look at how dyslexia affects a child's confidence or wellbeing, only at how it should be defined and identified. There's also no full agreement on how spelling difficulty should be measured as it remains harder to specify than reading, partly because teaching methods affect it in ways reading isn't affected. That is crucial to acknowledge, as it suggests that good teaching of spelling can literally change lives, and should be a rallying call for dyslexic parents of primary school children.
Agreeing on the problem is the first step. Whether it leads to better access to support is the next question.
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Source
Carroll, J. M., Holden, C., Kirby, P., Thompson, P. A., Snowling, M. J., and the Dyslexia Delphi Panel (2025). "Toward a consensus on dyslexia: findings from a Delphi study." Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 66(7), 1065–1076. DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.14123.