Ask a room of teachers how to support a dyslexic pupil and someone will usually picture a separate intervention: a withdrawal group, a specialist session, something that happens somewhere else, to someone else. Useful as those can be, they miss the point I care about most. The bulk of the work happens in the ordinary lesson, with the ordinary class, and it’s well within the reach of any teacher.
The reason I’m confident about that runs through everything I’ve researched and written, including my Integrating dyslexia support into mainstream teaching CPD for Teachit (Ross, 2023): the things that help dyslexic learners overwhelmingly help everyone. Dyslexia-friendly teaching isn’t a separate specialism bolted onto your day. It’s good teaching, made visible and deliberate.
Start with how you present things
A great deal of difficulty is designed into resources without anyone meaning to. So this is the cheapest, fastest place to make a difference.
Keep slides and worksheets clear and uncluttered. Plenty of white space, a readable sans-serif font, not too much on a page. Give a soft copy of your slides and resources, so a pupil can work through them at their own pace rather than racing to copy before the screen changes. Print on coloured paper where it helps, and avoid busy backgrounds behind text. None of this singles anyone out, and all of it reduces the load for the whole class.
Give instructions in a way people can hold onto
Working memory is often where dyslexia bites hardest, so how you give instructions matters as much as what they are.
Chunk them. Two or three steps at a time, not ten. Put them somewhere visible so a pupil can check back rather than having to hold everything in their head. Offer information in more than one form, saying it and showing it, so nobody is relying on a single channel. And check understanding by asking a pupil to tell you the task back, rather than asking “does everyone understand?”, which almost never surfaces the ones who don’t.
Let technology do some of the lifting
Technology can quietly remove barriers, and much of it is already sitting on your school’s devices. The accessibility features built into Office 365 and Google Workspace, including immersive readers, text-to-speech and dictation, cost nothing and are already installed. Simple tools like reading rulers help too.
In my research I’ve seen how well this works, both the everyday kind and the more specialist. In my classroom observations for teachers’ agency (Ross, 2017), technology reduced the perceptible difference between pupils, sometimes with a pupil helping the teacher set it up, which quietly flipped the usual power dynamic in a lovely way. And in my study of a reading-support device, OrCam Learn (Ross, 2024), young people made real gains and, just as importantly, valued being able to read independently instead of waiting for an adult.
Watch the language, and the spotlight
This part is less about resources and more about relationships, and it matters more than people expect.
In my classroom research, the teachers who supported dyslexic pupils best used inclusive language almost without thinking about it, framing tasks as things “we” would tackle together rather than singling anyone out. They kept support discreet, reducing how perceptible a pupil’s difficulty was to the rest of the room, and they consistently treated dyslexia as something that has nothing to do with intelligence. That framing gets absorbed by pupils, and it protects both their engagement and their wellbeing.
The flip side is worth remembering: young people are often very sensitive about who knows, and they don’t want their dyslexia “outed”. Handle disclosure and support with care and discretion. I’ve written more about the link between all this and mental health in protecting the wellbeing of dyslexic learners.
Adapt, rather than differentiate
There’s an important shift underneath all of this, and it’s the difference between differentiation and adaptive teaching. Handing a pupil a visibly different, easier task can single them out, and being singled out is linked to poorer wellbeing. Adaptive teaching instead designs the lesson from the start so a range of needs is met within the same learning. That’s the approach I explore across my recent research, and it’s the one that protects belonging while keeping expectations high.
Build your own knowledge
You don’t need to wait for your school to fund a course. There’s good, free CPD available through MOOCs, Seneca, Microsoft Learning and similar, and it’s a genuinely useful way to build confidence. If you or your school want something more structured and dyslexia-specific, that’s what my courses and guides and the Schools Guide to Dyslexia are for, and I deliver training and consultancy directly to schools.
None of what’s here needs a heroic budget. It needs knowing what to do, being allowed to do it, and choosing to. Do these things well and you won’t only support your dyslexic learners. You’ll teach a better lesson for everyone in the room.
Questions people often ask
What’s the single most useful thing I can do tomorrow? Share soft copies of your slides and declutter your resources. It’s quick, it costs nothing, it singles nobody out, and it helps the whole class as well as your dyslexic learners.
Do dyslexia strategies only help dyslexic pupils? No, and that’s rather the point. Almost everything that helps dyslexic learners is good teaching that benefits everyone, which is what makes it realistic to build into an ordinary lesson.
What’s the difference between differentiation and adaptive teaching? Differentiation often gives a pupil something visibly different to do, which can single them out. Adaptive teaching designs one lesson that anticipates a range of needs within the same learning, protecting belonging while keeping expectations high.
Is assistive technology expensive? Usually not. A lot of it, including text-to-speech, dictation and immersive readers, is already built into the software your school uses. It just needs turning on and building into normal practice.
References and further reading
- Ross, H. (2023) Integrating dyslexia support into mainstream teaching, Teachit CPD. Read the CPD
- Ross, H. (2024) Impact of OrCam Learn on reading comprehension, Support for Learning, 39(3), 95-103. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9604.12474
- Ross, H. (2017) An exploration of teachers’ agency and social relationships within dyslexia-support provision in an English secondary school, British Journal of Special Education, 44(2), 186-202. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12174
- Ross, H., Malone, E. and Wood, P. (2025) Teachers’ views on the implementation of adaptive literacy and well-being strategies: a case study, Education 3-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2025.2566991
See the full list of publications.