For the last few months many parents have been moving their children into high schools on the island as they come to an end of primary age schooling in Year 6.
Not a difficult process you would imagine, and it isn’t just as long as you can read or have no learning difficulties to speak of. If you don’t, you’re in, if you do, you’re definitely out.
The thing about tests that rely on reading ability to measure intelligence is that they are only really useful if you can read. If say, you suffer from dyslexia or other learning needs, they are generally worthless. Reading ability doesn’t outline intelligence any more than the size of feet determines footballing ability.
A child with dyslexia who has to read for himself the entrance exam, will undoubtedly score badly, which will ultimately affect his self-esteem when it comes to learning, which will finally determine his attitude to school. However if the questions on the test are read to the child and his answers scribed without interruption or interpretation, the chances are very high that he will pass the test well.
This is because by giving him a helping hand, the test becomes valuable as it is not testing just how bad the learning disability is, it is actually testing the levels of intelligence the boy has. Once he starts to pass exams, his self-esteem returns and so does his general outlook.
Schools have a lot to answer for when it comes to moulding self-esteem.
Now let’s take Bahrain’s attitude to learning difficulties like dyslexia. It would seem that if you have one then you cannot access the best.
Recent experiences have demonstrated that if you actually are the best school on the island, and therefore by default the best equipped to help a child with learning difficulties, you can and will refuse them hands down because well, you are the best school on the island, and you can do what you want.
Likewise if you are the second best, third best and so on, even if you want to take on children and help them develop, blossom and grow, you can’t because the ministry won’t allow you to. The only schools in Bahrain who have taken children with learning needs in the past have now been prevented from taking such children until they get a licence to do so from the ministry itself. Even the teachers and leaders who will deliver the support have degrees from established universities that say they are very well equipped to do so.
So where does this leave the poor children who can’t pass the entrance exams but who need the help of schools the most? It leaves them on the outside looking in. It leaves them finishing last in the admissions race because they had a lead weight tied round their ankles even though without the weight they could compete with the best.
So I urge schools that turn children away without even meeting them, because they have reports that say they are working below average, schools with egos as big as their Press coverage who turn children away because they can and education ministries who seem to make policies up on the spot, to grow up and remember that we are all in this together, the dyslexic, the dyspraxic, the dyscalculic or like me, just the plain disillusioned.