Speedie Readies: Show the Code. The Dual-Route Approach that Builds Word Mapping Mastery and Facilitates Orthographic Mapping
Preventing the Dyslexia Paradox
Rory screened at high risk before he started school. His older brother was diagnosed at age 8, and there is a family history.
He initially had very weak phonemic awareness. He couldn’t easily isolate, segment, or blend speech sounds. His phonological working memory was also weak. He struggled if a word had more than three sounds.
We preventing the dyslexia paradox by giving his brain what was needed BEFORE he faced reading and spelling difficulties in school. Team work makes the (preventing the dyslexia paradox) dream work!
Together, Let's Reject the Wait to Fail Approach
Why Wait to Fail? Understanding the Dyslexia Paradox
The dyslexia paradox describes the gap between when dyslexia is usually identified and when intervention is most effective. Many children are only diagnosed after they’ve struggled for years, often by the end of Year 2 or Year 3. Yet research shows that the optimal window for support is much earlier, in Reception and Year 1, when the foundations for reading and spelling are formed. This delay creates a wait to fail system that affects confidence, wellbeing and long-term academic progress.
Current practice
Many children are not offered formal assessment or targeted intervention until they have already shown significant and persistent reading difficulties. This often means two or more years of struggle before help is provided.
Delayed diagnosis
A large number of children are not formally identified until late primary or even secondary school, long after early signs were present.
Impact on intervention
By the time a diagnosis is made, the most effective window for intervention has passed. Catch-up support in later years takes much longer and requires significantly more intensive teaching.
The Optimal Window for 'Prevention of the Intervention'
Early risk screening before phonics
Research shows that early risk indicators for dyslexia can be observed as early as the start of Reception, before formal phonics instruction begins. These include:
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speech sound difficulties
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challenges with phonological awareness
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difficulty noticing or manipulating sounds within words
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reduced ease in hearing and producing speech sound sequences
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signs of weak sound processing or inconsistent speech production
These indicators appear before letters are taught and provide an opportunity to support children before they encounter reading failure.
Risk screening during phonics
Once phonics teaching begins, additional signs become clearer. These include:
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difficulty mapping speech sounds to graphemes
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challenges with blending
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slow or inaccurate segmenting
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limited progress with taught correspondences
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difficulty retaining GPCs
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ongoing struggle to move from decoding to comprehension
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signs of inaccurate or inconsistent word retrieval when spelling
Identifying these difficulties early allows schools to intervene long before a formal diagnosis would typically occur.
Preventing academic gaps
Early intervention, both before and during phonics, helps children build the core skills needed to keep pace with their peers. It also increases the likelihood that they enter the self-teaching phase of reading, where they can rapidly expand their reading vocabulary.
How We Can Address the Dyslexia Paradox
Proactive early risk screening
Screening before phonics identifies children with early speech sound and sound-processing vulnerabilities. Screening during phonics highlights children who cannot easily map phonemes to graphemes or who are not developing early word-level skills.
Building proactive systems
A proactive 'screening and tracking the learning journey of individuals' model focuses on preventing difficulties rather than waiting for them to become entrenched. This is the opposite of the wait to fail approach. It also means that schools accept that whole class teaching will not meet the needs of all within the diverse classroom. They need a TA to work 1:1 with children from term 1 of Reception. We show them what to do, and the word mapping technology removes the need for TAs to first learn how to map words.
Targeted early prevention of the intervention
Providing structured, evidence-based support in the early years can significantly improve outcomes and prevent the cycle of repeated failure that often leads to a dyslexia diagnosis. We focus on preventing the need to offer an intervention.
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The Dyslexia Paradox
Upstream screening changes outcomes. By identifying speech, sound, and mapping differences in the first term of Reception, we can prevent reading failure rather than respond to it later. Early screening allows TAs to observe how each child processes speech sounds and connects them to print, long before phonics difficulties become visible. When support begins in Term 2, every child, including those who are non-speaking, can move confidently into the self-teaching phase. At this point, children learn more about reading through reading itself. This approach removes the “wait to fail” model that drives the dyslexia paradox and ensures every child develops the foundation for fluent reading and comprehension from the very start, with access to books that spark a lifelong passion for reading.
Preventing the Dyslexia Paradox: Why Acting Before Year 2 Makes All the Difference. No More Wait to Fail.
The dyslexia paradox describes the contradiction that dyslexia risk can be identified early, yet most children are not supported until they have already experienced years of reading failure.
In preschool-aged children, research has shown that phonological awareness is the most important emergent literacy skill to develop and is the best early predictor for later reading success (de Witt & Lessing, 2016; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster & Hulme, 2012, Lonigan et al., 2013; Sensenbaugh, 1996). Research indicates that it is the best predictor of the ease of early reading acquisition (Stanovich, 1993-94), better even than IQ, vocabulary, and listening comprehension.
Children who have well-developed phonemic awareness by age 5 are more likely to become proficient readers by age 7 (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) Conversely, weak phonological awareness is a hallmark feature of dyslexia. Learners will struggle to master phonics if they have weak phonemic awareness skills and poor phonemic awareness is a common contributor to specific reading disability or dyslexia (Furnes et al., 2019).
Research in cognitive neuroscience has established that the brain’s capacity to form the neural connections linking speech, print, and meaning is greatest before the age of seven. Dehaene (2009) demonstrated that learning to read reorganises neural circuits involved in visual and auditory processing, but this process becomes less efficient as neural plasticity declines. Hulme and Snowling (2016) showed that weaknesses in phoneme awareness and letter–sound mapping during the early years are among the strongest predictors of later reading disorders, highlighting the need for early, proactive intervention. Seidenberg (2017) emphasised that fluent reading depends on the automation of these mappings through exposure and self-teaching, but this process can only occur if children reach that stage early enough.
By Year 3, prevention is no longer possible. The focus shifts to remediation because the window for early intervention has been missed. Children who have not mastered phoneme–grapheme mapping by this stage are already behind in reading fluency and spelling. They often work harder but achieve less because their brains have not yet automated the link between speech, print, and meaning. This is not a reflection of ability but of timing. The system waited too long to act.
The paradox persists because the current system waits for children to fail before intervening. National policy mandates uniform, programme-based instruction in the early years, assuming that all children will respond equally to synthetic phonics. Yet around one in four do not progress as expected. These children often include those with speech, language, and communication needs or other neurodivergent profiles who require more adaptive, linguistically grounded approaches.
Preventing the dyslexia paradox means identifying and supporting these children early, before difficulty becomes entrenched. Interventions such as Speedie Readies focus on word mapping within meaningful context, helping learners connect speech and print through visual and linguistic cues. The system is designed to move each child towards the self-teaching phase, where reading and spelling become self-sustaining.
Early, individualised support is not about replacing phonics but about making it accessible to all learners. Every child deserves the opportunity to experience success, joy, and independence in reading from the start. The earlier this happens, the less likely it is that dyslexia will define their educational journey.
The Early Dyslexia Screening Centre is a Speedie Readies delivery partner.
Prevent the Dyslexia Paradox with Speedie Readies. Every learner can achieve Word Mapping Mastery and experience the joy of reading before KS2
References
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. Penguin.
de Witt, M., & Lessing, A. (2016). The influence of a school readiness program on the language and phonological awareness skills of preschool children in rural areas of South Africa. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 41(1), 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/183693911604100114
Furnes, B., Elwér, Å., Samuelsson, S., Olson, R. K., & Byrne, B. (2019). Investigating the double-deficit hypothesis in more and less transparent orthographies: A longitudinal study from preschool to Grade 2. Scientific Studies of Reading, 23(6), 478–493. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2019.1610410
Hulme, C., & Snowling, M. J. (2016). Reading disorders and dyslexia. Current Opinion in Pediatrics, 28(6), 731–735. https://doi.org/10.1097/MOP.0000000000000407
Lonigan, C. J., Purpura, D. J., Wilson, S. B., Walker, P. M., & Clancy-Menchetti, J. (2013). Evaluating the components of an emergent literacy intervention for preschool children at risk for reading difficulties. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(1), 111–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2012.08.010
Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S.-A. H., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 322–352. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026744
Seidenberg, M. S. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many cannot, and what can be done about it. Basic Books.
Sensenbaugh, R. (1996). Phonemic awareness: An important early step in learning to read (ERIC Digest). ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading, English, and Communication.
Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. National Academy Press.
Stanovich, K. E. (1993–1994). Romance and reality. The Reading Teacher, 47(4), 280–291.
How Speedie Readies Prevents the Dyslexia Paradox
