Cartoon pictures of a grey mongrel cat washing herself and a small blue alien are at the heart of a new test to help parents to establish whether their children have dyslexia.

The ten-minute test, developed by speech therapists and psychologists, screens young children for language disorders from the age of 3. By testing simple grammatical and pre-reading skills, parents, teachers or assistants can check whether a child is “school-ready” or may need more help.

The test comes after Ruth Kelly, the former Education Secretary, sent her nine-year-old son, who is believed to have dyslexia, to a private boarding school which specialises in teaching children with the condition.

The grammar and phonology screening test (Gaps) has been developed over 16 years by Professor Heather van der Lely, the director of the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. “What motivated me was seeing first-hand how failing to diagnose these problems was blighting young lives. In most cases, once diagnosed, these language disorders can be helped or overcome with the right treatments and professional help.”

Professor van der Lely, who is dyslexic, added: “My team and I used existing knowledge of specific language impairment to devise a test for 3½ to 6½-year-olds which would evaluate their basic grammatical ability — something that is crucial if they are to understand teachers’ instructions and learn to write sentences.” Designed to be easy to use and accurate for parents and professionals, Ms van der Lely employs Bik, a small blue alien, to examine whether children can create sentences and add sounds to make words.

For £50, parents receive an illustrated booklet and five tests, from which they read sentences out to their child. In the first part of the test, the child repeats back the sentence to Bik, the alien cut-out who, they are told, only understands children. In the second part, parents say specially made-up words to their children and ask them to say them back.

Sentences such as “the cat is washing herself” are designed to test the syntax — or rules of a sentence — as well as the morphology of words — how words are made bigger. A child with language difficulties will not be able to repeat the entire sentence and might say, “The cat is washing her”.

The made-up words test the phonology or sound system of a sentence. If a children score less than 10-15 per cent, Professor van der Lely recommends that parents seek professional help. If scores are borderline, she suggests that children are retested later on.

The test has been welcomed by the British Dyslexia Association, which receives numerous calls from parents who cannot persuade schools to test their children for dyslexia.

Although the special educational needs code of practice states that every school and authority has a duty to “identify, assess and make provision for children with special educational needs”, Jennifer Owen Adams, the association’s director of education, said that not all are proactive. Parents could now test their child and use the results not as a stick to chastise schools but to begin a constructive dialogue, she said.

“What’s good about this test, is that it gives parents the power to test their child — but not to use it as a stick with which to beat schools, just one to use in constructive dialogue,” she said.

The test packs, which were tried on 668 children, are available at www.dldcn.com

Problems with words

• More than half a million children suffer from a language problem and about ten per cent of the population is believed to have dsylexia. About 375,000 children in Britain are severely dyslexic
• Dyslexia makes learning to read, write, spell and do mathematics difficult. An inability to concentrate and a lack of short-term memory are also symptoms
• Famous dyslexics include Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Tom Cruise, Jamie Oliver and Felicity Kendal
  Source: Times archive

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• An officer and a gentle woman
• Dame Helen Mirren is worthy of the Epidaurus
• Foods that can help to prevent swine flu