Birth to Three
If children, around one in five, are born high risk and don’t get the right personalised support well before age 7 in school, they’re most likely to face a lifetime of reading and spelling difficulties.
That would have been Jamie Oliver and others.
It’s genuinely difficult to make reading and spelling easy after age 7 for high risk children in school. Those who become avid readers later, for example through home education, were not high risk. It’s the underlying risk factors that matter.
The dreaded combination is being born high risk and no one changing the way sound is processed by the brain, or how speech and print connect, before the end of Year 1. Home educating parents often think children will learn to read in their own time, and they will if they have strong phonemic awareness. High risk children do not.
It’s far easier for everyone, including families who plan to home educate, if we screen all children before they turn three, well before they’re taught phonics, and then give each child what they need long before age 7. That isn’t happening for any of the children later diagnosed with dyslexia.
Give me a child at three and they will never experience difficulties or need a diagnosis. I can tell parents not to worry, or tell them exactly what to do.
It would stop children struggling and would save the wider world, including the taxpayer, a fortune.
Emma Hartnell-Baker
Two minutes of daily speech sound play with this app will change outcomes for a child with high dyslexia risk factors and help prevent the dyslexia paradox.
Amari just thinks he's playing. He's so proud of himself!
Ground breaking speech sound processing tech that children choose as play? This takes us a step closer to making learning to read, spell and communicate, including for non-speaking children, easy and fun for every child.
The Department for Education (DfE) recently launched a new opportunity for schools and colleges across England to help shape the future of education technology, introducing the EdTech Impact Testbed Pilot.
This tech has been submitted for inclusion, so keep your fingers (and toes) crossed for us so that we can reach more children! Parents can start this even earlier.
Learn more about the Monster Spelling Piano app for tablets!
Why Early Dyslexia Risk Screening Birth to Three Matters
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Identifying speech sound processing issues between birth and age three is crucial to avoiding what researchers call the dyslexia paradox. The dyslexia paradox refers to the fact that dyslexia is typically diagnosed too late for optimal intervention. Although the signs of risk are evident in early speech and language development, formal identification usually occurs only after a child has experienced repeated reading failure, often around age seven or eight, when the brain’s language networks are already less malleable and self-esteem has been affected.
From birth to three, the brain is undergoing rapid development in auditory perception, phonological memory, and speech sound categorisation. During this time, children learn to discriminate, store, and reproduce the sounds of their language, skills that form the foundation for later phoneme awareness and mapping speech to print. When difficulties in perceiving or producing speech sounds go unnoticed, the neural pathways that support phonological processing are less efficiently established. This can later manifest as problems with decoding, spelling, and word recognition once formal reading instruction begins.
Early identification matters because neuroplasticity is greatest before school entry. When speech sound processing difficulties are recognised and supported early through enriched language exposure, phoneme-level play, and responsive communication, children can strengthen the very systems that dyslexia later disrupts. Interventions at this stage are preventive rather than remedial.
In short, identifying speech sound processing issues from birth to three helps prevent the dyslexia paradox by addressing the root of later reading difficulty before literacy failure occurs. It shifts the focus from compensating for deficits in primary school to building the underlying sound–symbol processing system from the start.
What makes us different at the Early Dyslexia Screening Centre is not just our ability to connect with the youngest children so that they want to play with us, but also our capacity to act on what we find. When we identify babies and toddlers as being at high risk, we do not simply label or wait. We begin early, playful intervention that strengthens the speech sound processing and language foundations that reading will later rely on. Our focus is on prevention, not prediction, ensuring that children who might otherwise face reading difficulties have the best possible start.
Do you know anyone working in early years settings? Birth to Three? Ask them to get in touch to find out how they can add Duck Hands® and Phonemies to their teaching toolkit. Email MissEmma@DyslexiaWhisperer.com