Research
My research
I've been researching dyslexia and SEND for over a decade, mostly by sitting in classrooms, kitchens and staffrooms and listening carefully to the people living it. My work is qualitative at heart, though I'll happily run the numbers when a question needs them. This is a plain-English tour of what I've studied and what I found.
Where it started: dyslexia support in a mainstream school
My PhD at the University of Bath was an ethnography of one secondary school in south-west England, looking at dyslexia support from three angles.
Teachers. The teachers I observed worked hard to close the gap between themselves and their dyslexic students, using inclusive language and treating them as capable learners. Beyond the classroom door, though, they had very little say over resources or policy. Their good intentions kept running into a system that didn’t give them room to act on them (British Journal of Special Education, 2017).
Young people. I spent five months with nine students aged 11 to 14. How they understood their own dyslexia shaped how they dealt with friends, teachers and family, and those relationships in turn shaped how they saw themselves. Being treated as “children” left them with little say in decisions about their own support (Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 2021).
Parents and carers. Parents described getting the right support as a battle. How they made sense of dyslexia affected how confidently they could deal with school, and some were far better placed than others to be heard (British Journal of Special Education, 2019, and the chapter “It’s a Battle!”, 2020).
Families, policy and the cost of dyslexia
I led the data analysis for the All-Party Parliamentary Group report The Human Cost of Dyslexia (2019), drawing on more than 1,300 survey responses about the emotional and financial toll of poorly supported dyslexia. I also wrote a review of SpLD support systems for the Council for Science and Technology (2020), and gave written evidence to the Education Select Committee on what the COVID-19 school closures meant for pupils with SEND.
Wellbeing and adaptive teaching
With Dr Elizabeth Malone and Dr Peter Wood, I’ve been exploring what we nicknamed “wobbly wellbeing”: the link between literacy difficulties and how children feel about themselves. In one small primary school, staff and pupils valued adaptive teaching that started from the individual child, and calming tools like regulation stations made a real difference. Spelling, however, stayed stubbornly stressful and kept chipping away at children’s confidence. That’s a finding I think every school should sit with for a moment (Pastoral Care in Education, 2025 and Education 3-13, 2025).
Assistive technology, tested honestly
Plenty of products promise to transform reading. I prefer to check. In a study across three schools, 32 students aged 10 to 13 scored on average 8.31 standard points higher on reading comprehension when using OrCam Learn, and 94% preferred it to reading on their own. It was a short, small study funded by OrCam, which I declare in the paper, and it needs testing at a larger scale (Support for Learning, 2024). I’ve also evaluated the Lili Lamp, and co-authored a commentary on how academics should work with technology companies without compromising the research. I’ve written more about that in Evaluating EdTech honestly.
Beyond school: the Churchill Fellowship
My 2025 Churchill Fellowship took me to Victoria, Tasmania, Texas and Florida to look at how neurodivergent girls and young women aged 16 to 25 move on from compulsory education. The report, School & Beyond, was published in August 2026 with 30 recommendations. The clearest finding is that a good transition depends on self-knowledge, confidence and the ability to self-advocate, and that young women can only do that if the systems around them listen. As I put it in the report, the removal of support is not the same as the development of independence.
And a few detours
I’ve also worked on climate change education through the You and CO2 project (Environmental Education Research, 2023), contributed to books on SEND for early career teachers and on race and SEND, and co-edited a cookbook for independent scholars, which included my own contribution on the cream tea culture wars. My book, Literacy Learning Journeys: An Educator’s Guide to Dyslexia, Ages 0-18, brings much of this research together for educators.