Our purpose and values
Why we’re here
We established our Charitable Trust in 2015 so that students with Specific learning difficulties could receive help even when their families could not pay.
Our vision
All children with learning difficulties receive appropriate help, regardless of ability to pay.
Our mission
We provide support to families of students with specific learning difficulties, in the Wellington region, who are unable to access specialised literacy help for financial reasons.
Our purpose
We are motivated to help provide a safety net for those who cannot afford to access existing services.
Our values
Equity
This is what drives our very existence, and those who provide services for the Trust.
Before establishing the Trust, our educators had experience of providing specialist tuition to individuals who had been identified as having a Specific Learning Difficulty.
As this was funded by individual parents, our educators ended up working only with those who could afford to pay. This meant that many children identified with learning difficulties were left struggling because the options were still limited by the parents’ ability to pay.
This is why we established Learning Ways as a charitable trust to ensure families could access our specialist services regardless of their financial circumstances.
Providing support rather than labels and expensive diagnosis
Parents and teachers can identify when children are unexpectedly struggling with an aspect of learning. Dyslexia is seen as inability to read and is addressed first by providing tuition in an effective way regardless of the cause of the difficulty.
Recognising individual differences
Recognition of Learning Difficulties has had a very fraught history over more than fifty years in New Zealand and overseas.
The Ministry of Education finally agreed to recognise the existence of Dyslexia in New Zealand in October 2007 and since then has made very slow progress in addressing what should follow from this recognition.
Dyslexia was ignored in the New Zealand context for so long for fear that labelling children as Dyslexic would result in exclusion and worse outcomes for the child.
These fears were probably justified when we see in some settings more emphasis on having individuals diagnosed than on providing the very best teaching to help with their difficulties.
Evidence-based practice
The teaching of reading has been controversial in educational institutes.
Many now recognise that declining literacy rates are a direct result of discontinuing the teaching of the relationships between sounds and letters as a fundamental reading skill. There was an emphasis on a whole language approach that relies on recognition of whole words and their meaning as the basis of reading.
International research has now reached consensus on what constitutes the most effective reading strategies for all students, and what is absolutely essential for those who do not pick up reading easily.
They include the explicit teaching of the language being read and the alphabetic coding skills required to recognise words accurately and fluently.
Response to intervention
When a child does not make expected progress after ‘evidence-based individual tuition’ then, referral for identification on underlying difficulties will be supported.
“The negative consequences of reading failure for both individuals and society are massive, and with the right intervention there are very few people who can’t learn to read.
This is ultimately a social justice issue – kids whose parents can’t afford private tutors or therapists should not be left to fall through the literacy cracks”.
– Spelfabet Website